Starting today, Feltman’s of Coney Island owner and Brooklyn native Michael Quinn will be selling hot dogs at Augers Well, the bar at 115 St. Mark's Place between Avenue A and First Avenue.
Instead of serving $2 hot dogs as they did all summer Feltman’s will be serving up enormous franks for $5 each, along with their very popular homemade apple cider vinegar mustard, which will be whipped up daily in the Augurs Well kitchen.
Feltman's is named after Charles Feltman, purportedly the inventor of the hot dog as well as the restaurant that was located in Coney Island from 1870-1954. (Read more about Feltman at the Coney Island History Project here.)
Quinn reportedly still plans to reopen a restaurant in Coney Island... but, as the Coney Island Blog notes, "right now he’s having fun telling the Feltman’s story and creating brand recognition." And he will be doing so right next door to Crif Dogs. Of course Feltman's and Nathan's co-exited for more than 40 years in Coney Island...
This sweet dog was found wandering Avenue A this morning, and the owners of the Macaron Parlour on St. Mark's Place have been caring for her until they find her owner.
The store's number is: 212.387.9169
Updated 8:04 p.m.
Dog and owner have been reunited… apparently the dog had gotten loose from a neighbor on St. Mark's Place…
On Aug. 1, Roberta Bailey was taking her pug, Sidney, to Washington Square Park. Outside her apartment on St. Mark's Place between Second Avenue and Third Avenue, a pit bull with a crusty/traveler who was asleep, lunged at Sidney.
Here's The Villager with the narrative:
“People were bashing the dog on his head with a stick,” she said. “Someone screamed to me, ‘Grab the balls!’ and I squeezed that dog’s balls as hard as I could. He didn’t let go. I tried to pick up his legs, which I was told you’re supposed to do.
Sidney, who was 14, did not survive the attack. You can read the full story here at The Villager, who first reported on the incident. (An EVG reader came across the aftermath of the attack on Aug. 1 and shared the above photo. At the time, the reader was unsure of what happened except for that it was a dog attack.)
In the early morning hours of Aug. 5, Michael Puzzo says he was walking his girlfriend's dog Bobito, a 10-year-old, 9-pound Havanese-Maltese mix, on East Sixth Street near Second Avenue. He spotted a man and his brindle-brown pit bull asleep in the middle of the sidewalk, as Gothamist reported yesterday.
Puzzo says that he started to walk around the "situation" as slowly as possible, but that the dog opened its eyes as soon as Puzzo and his dog came close ("like when you come across a sleeping vampire," Puzzo analogized). "I yanked my dog's harness up like a fuzzy yo-yo and blocked the pit's mouth with my arm," Puzzo said. "It … was pretty fucking bloody and painful. To be bitten by a dog is a very strange feeling. It felt like someone had lit my arm on fire."
Puzzo told Gothamist that he wasn't sure how long the dog had his right arm. The pit bull's owner immediately woke up and eventually got the dog away from Puzzo. Read the whole article here.
Later on Aug. 5, Ed Vassilev was taking Misha, his Vizsla — a Hungarian midsize-breed dog — for a walk on Second Avenue between East Fourth Street and East Fifth Street "when a male pit bull down the block — next to two crusties slumped on the sidewalk, possibly nodding out — set its sights on the smaller dog. The black-and-white pit suddenly took off on a dead run down the empty pavement. It didn’t bark or growl — it just came silently speeding like a missile straight toward them."
“It was like from 50 feet away,” Vassilev told The Villager. “That dog saw my dog. He wasn’t on a leash. I picked up my dog. When he jumped up and bit me, it was like it was in slow motion. He got a chunk of my arm. It was brutal. It wasn’t a nip — he bit through my arm,” Vassilev said.
Vassilev, who had to spend several nights at Beth Israel, likely has permanent nerve damage in his left arm.
All of it could have been avoided if de Blasio were addressing the city’s rising homeless problem, he said.
“A couple of years back, there were homeless people, but I would see the same faces,” Vassilev said.
There wasn't any mention of the mayor in The Villager's version.
As for a dog biting a person, The Villager reports that it is not considered a criminal offense — it's a civil offense.
Updated the headline after multiple readers questioned whether these were actually pit bulls involved in the attacks. The Villager, Gothamist and the Post all identified the dogs as pit bulls.
In this weekly feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.
Name: Parker Dulany Occupation: Musician, Singer in Certain General, Painter Location: St. Mark's Place at Avenue A Time: 4:15 p.m. on Monday, March 7
I moved to the city right after school to be a painter, and I ended up being in a band. I moved right here. It was pretty exciting and pretty scary. I came in 1979. I’ve lived right here, appropriately enough in the building [that has] the hot dog that says Eat Me.
I had an art opening almost immediately, about a week or two after I got here. I was lucky enough to be given a chance to show with Club 57, which is that little church [at 57] St. Mark's Place. Ann Magnuson ran it. She gave me my first chance. I didn’t know it, but I had landed… it was sort of like the elite downtown people, with Keith Haring and Jean Michel-Basquiat. I just happened to be one of the people in the show.
I didn’t really know how good my fortune was. That led to being in a lot of openings all over the place. My work is pretty expressionistic. It kind of didn’t fit at all with what they were doing. I mean, they liked it and everything like that. They kind of looked at my stuff and they didn’t know what to make of it.
Then about a year later, I ended up being in a band called Certain General. I had never sang before the band, and now we’ve been around for 30-something years. We made it quite big in Europe, and so we’re going over in about a month.
My ex-girlfriend used to live ... on Avenue B. So in 1981, we would all go and walk across the roofs on Avenue B and climb into the abandoned building, which is now the luxury Christodora House. We would climb the rubble to the roof and nude sunbathe above the apocalypse, with the bridges, World Trade Center, Tompkins Square and the Empire State Building at our naked feet, sort of "Bonfire of the Vanities" shit, listen to the Clash or Spandau Ballet on a beatbox. It was very decadent.
The safest street in the East Village was Seventh between Avenue B and C, because that was heroin strip and there were lookouts everywhere. Anyone came down that street, they were on you. The dealers didn't want any trouble. We didn't do dope, but we rehearsed at Tu Casa, a legendary studio that was on B and 6th.
One time, my guitarist [in Certain General] ran into the studio and said he had been mugged, and both of his guitars had been taken. Everyone fanned out, alerted the locals and ran around the neighborhood. We eventually found the culprits. The guitars were so heavy that the [thieves] couldn't run fast enough to get away and were pooped and sat down. They weren't strong enough, because they were — two teenage girls. I think one of the girls had a knife, but Jesus — teenage girls! Oh my God, it was fucking funny. We give the guitarist shit to this day. We didn't even call the cops it was so embarrassing.
I was just walking through the Park to listen to those kids singing and it was reminding me. I played in Tompkins Square, with the biggest concert ever. It was in 1981 maybe, and it was called Avenue B - the Place to Be, and it was us and the Bush Tetras, and a bunch of other bands. There used to be a bandshell over there. It was a more formal stage. I really liked that. It was a big crowd. It’s on video. It was pretty cool, I have to admit.
I think I’ve always been about just making something. I just can’t be bored, and I’d rather make something than buy something. It was the whole DIY, do it yourself — everything was do it yourself. We just wanted to make something, that’s all.
James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.
The Swiss Institute debuts its inaugural exhibit at new East Village home (Friday) ... Printed Matter/St. Mark's opens today inside the Swiss Institute (Friday)
Grape and Grain returns under new ownership on 6th Street (Friday)
Little League playoff game delayed 45 minutes while a red-tailed hawk ate a pigeon (Saturday)
This 3-story building on 6th Street is for sale (air rights included) (Tuesday)
Starting Monday, November 24, you can have a beer with your meal at 3 St. Marks Pl. 12oz Heineken Light Bottles and 12oz Brooklyn Lager Cans will be available to start, with new items being added each season.
The beer will be available Sunday through Thursday from 11:00AM – 10:00PM and Friday & Saturday from 11:00AM – 11:00PM. You must purchase a food item off the menu to buy and enjoy a beer.
Unlike the other Papaya and Hot Dog copycat restaurants in New York City, Papaya King on St. Marks Pl. is more than a grab and go location. With a giant projection screen along the back wall, old school arcade games in the front, foosball in the back, loud music and a long picnic table down the middle, it is a place to rub elbows with your friends, neighbors, classmates and someone new.
The Papaya King owners were turned down for a beer license back in May 2013. According to CB3 documents, the St. Mark's Block Association and 8 St. Mark's Tenants' Association submitted letters and testimony in opposition to this application.
CB3 again turned down their application in September 2013, citing a failure "to provide substantial community support from area residents." While five people spoke out in support of the license, only one of them actually lived within the CB3 boundaries, according to CB3 documents.
So it looks as if Papaya King made some concessions, cutting back the proposed hours for beer sales. (They originally wanted to sell beer until 4 a.m. Thursday through Sundays.)
Papaya King opened in the East Village in May 2013. Papaya King opened on East 86th Street in 1932.
Chi Snack Shop moves into the former Trash & Vaudeville space on St. Mark's Place (Friday)
Elsewhere nearby: the flagship Dean & Deluca is closed for now on Broadway and Prince (Wednesday)
The former Social Tees space on 5th Street is for rent (Monday)
...and over at the Bowery Mural Wall... the intricate new work by Tomokazu Matsuyama, which took nearly two weeks to complete, was tagged the other day...
... and a worker was on the scene yesterday trying to clean off the graffiti...
This past weekend, Boyd constructed an elaborate medieval fence on one of the adopted tree garden plots outside 99 St. Mark's Place between Avenue A and First Avenue.
The fence is to help remind dog walkers and people looking for a place to sit that every garden space is precious...
NYC rents hit record high (Gothamist) ... Meanwhile, operating costs for rent-stabilized apartment buildings increased 5.5 percent from March 2018 to March 2019, a new Rent Guidelines Board report claims (Curbed)
A 36-year-old man committed suicide by jumping in front of an L train at the First Avenue station on Monday evening (Town & Village)
At their Easter worship celebrations on Sunday, the Middle Collegiate Church, 112 Second Ave. between Sixth Street and Seventh Street, will feature selections from “Jesus Christ Superstar” at 9:30 and 11:45 am. (Official site)
Over at the Classic Stage Company on 13th Street, Marc Blitzstein's historic 1937 fervently pro-labor "play in music" "The Cradle Will Rock" continues through May 19 (Official site)
See "2001: A Space Odyssey" in the big auditorium this weekend at the Village East (Official site)
Some history of St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church on 12th Street, now a monument in front of an NYU dorm (Ephemeral New York)
How New York's raw gay history ended up in a box (Popula)
At Essex Crossing, 180 Broome St. has reached its full height of 26 stories (The Lo-Down)
The story of how this Keith Haring mural was saved from the LES... and now on display in Red Hook (Artsy)
Diversions: When the Psychedelic Furs were "one of the coolest, most underground groups around" (Dangerous Minds ... and I recall that frontman Richard Butler once lived on St. Mark's Place?)
In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.
Name:Roberta Bayley (and Stella) Occupation: Photographer Location: St. Mark's Place and 2nd Avenue Date: Tuesday, May 23 at 3:15 p.m.
I was born in Pasadena, Calif. I went from California to London, where I lived for three or four years, and then I came to New York in 1974. I came here because I had a one-way ticket from London to New York. I didn’t know anybody here, but I had to get out of England fast — nothing illegal, romantic. New York was where the ticket was. My friend ... said, ‘I have a one-way ticket to New York,’ and I said, ‘I’ll take it.’
I had a list of names in New York that people had given me in London. Everybody I met was really great. Some people let me stay with them, and then I found an old friend in Brooklyn from San Francisco, and I just stayed. I came to the neighborhood right off the bat, to East 12th Street.
The people I met when I came here were involved in the rock 'n' roll scene, so I got to know people like the New York Dolls and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. In the midst of all that, I was working at CBGBs — I would take the money at the door. I also had a very strong interest in photography, but I hadn’t been doing it, so I bought a camera, and then I started taking pictures of the bands. And that’s what I’m still doing.
I loved the Ramones, the Heartbreakers, the Voidoids. I liked some bands that never made it. The Miamis were one of my favorites. They were the first band I saw in New York. And a band called the Marbles — they were kinda cute but they didn’t make it.
The other lucky thing, besides working at CBGBs with all these new bands that didn’t have record labels or anything and needed pictures, was that I also went to work for a magazine called Punk, which sort of became the engine of the scene. That allowed me to not only photograph the bands, but also to photograph them in really weird situations. We used to do these things called fumettis, which is like a comic in photos, with little word balloons, but you take the pictures — it’s like a little movie.
It was great because to shoot photography that way, I’d always say this looks terrible, and they’d say, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll color the background in later,’ because that’s what it was. You could draw stuff in, so it made things pretty easy and fun. We had a lot of fun. We got to do wacky things like Mutant Monster Beach Party — we had a big shootout at Coney Island, and so some people were the surfers and some people were the bikers. Lester Bangs was a biker, Debbie [Harry] was a surfer, and they had a big battle on Coney Island. We all went out there and really acted it.
Debbie probably was my favorite person to photograph because she was so easy to photograph, and she was always such a nice person. We got to put people like Debbie Harry and Joey Ramone in situations they would have never really been in in real life, but those are some of my best-selling pictures — Joey with the surfboard is my top number one.
I like where I am. You can still eat for very cheap, and there are a lot of little quirky stores with interesting people running them. It’s a quirky neighborhood. It just has more grit to it, but St. Mark's has gotten pretty weird with all the empty storefronts. It’s like this weird ghost town. It has to be the greedy landlords are just asking for too much. The only thing that seems to make money on St. Mark's is cheap food, $1 pizza and Mamoun's.
I mean the place on the corner, they were going to serve vegan ice cream – you can’t make the rent with that. The Gap was there and they couldn’t pay the rent. It was funny when the Gap came in — it was all undercover. These big things were blocking it, and then one day they just came down and the Gap just kind of appeared intact. Now it would probably fit in a little better.
The big fire [on Second Avenue] was traumatizing ... the idea that your apartment would catch fire and you would lose everything. That was a really fast fire – I was across the street in a café when it happened.
I’ve been in the same place since 1975. My rent was $125 a month, so I wasn’t going anywhere. The neighborhood was cheap – that was the main thing back then. It was just very relaxed. Everybody talks about the city being so dangerous and horrible — I never really experienced that. I mean, I got mugged, but I didn’t think that was because of the city being bankrupt. I didn’t walk around feeling scared. I just thought it was great. That’s why I stayed — I connected with a scene that was happening here, which I hadn’t really been part of, just slightly in London and slightly in San Francisco. Here, though, it just felt like something new was happening, and it was exciting. Everybody was broke and everybody was trying to make it. It’s a fun time in your 20s. Wouldn’t go through it again, but I enjoyed it.
James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.
As Alex noted Sunday, the pooch who kept watch over the now-shuttered Spots' Cafe and Good Dog on St. Mark's Place is no longer on his perch....
In the comments on Alex's post, Jill said that she saw the pup in Chinatown...but, without photographic evidence, can we be sure that it's the same one? I'm actually curious what happened to the big fellow...I've softened my stance on him/her. Maybe I will miss the thing...At first, the dog seemed to represent the continued Disneyfication/froyogurtization of St. Mark's...serving as a metaphor for what was wrong with the neighborhood: big and stupid...Now, given the state of things, I hope the poor thing finds a good home. He/she just wanted to be loved.
Cellos has been added to the existing Pizzeria signage here between Second Avenue and Third Avenue. This development comes as an applicant is on this month's CB3-SLA docket for a beer-wine license for the address. (The applicants have already received administrative approval.)
The questionnaire isn't online, so we don't know more about the new owners.
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Updated: The questionnaire lists the operator as Larry Kramer, who owns Whitman's on Ninth Street (and Hudson Yards).
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A little pizzeria history here... Funzi's opened late last June and aspired to be an East Village throwback with a 1970s-80s decor modeled after owner Kevin Cox's grandmother's house.
Cox left the business in November ... taking the Funzi's name with him for a new version of the pizzeria in another EV location. (Funzi's was named after the youngest of Cox's three sons.) We never heard anything more about a new spot for Cox.
After Cox departed, the business pivoted to St. Marks Pizzeria... with a message on its website noting, "Same Pizza. Same Chef's. Same Location. New Name." This post-Funzi's concept went dark in December, and paper went up on the front windows several weeks ago.
You can see where the new operators simply put Cellos over where Funzi's was on the sign... and the post-Funzi's version below (both pics last year by Stacie Joy)...
Cellos marks the ninth food establishment at No. 36 — St. Marks Pizzeria, Funzi's, Oh K-Dog & Egg Toast, Joe's Steam Rice Roll, Cheers Cut, Friterie Belgian Fries, Fasta and the $1.50 branch of 2 Bros. Pizza — since 2015.
We're in the process of compiling a list of stores that are open today (aside from Ray's).
Please let us know in the comments. Or via the EV Grieve email. Or on Twitter. #EVopen (clever!)
Partial list... in progress Call ahead first. (and thank you for all the tips!)
Avenue A:
Key Food (now closed)
Ink
Croissanteria (now closed)
7A
Ray's
Tompkins Square Bagels
Ost
Table 12
That crazy liquor store at East Fourth Street
Native Bean
Yuca Bar (CLOSES at 5)
East 14th Street:
Associated (NOW CLOSED)
McDonald's
7-Eleven
Dunkin Donuts
Papaya Dog
Duane Reade(s)
Adams Deli
St. Mark's Place:
Ray's Pizza and Bagel Cafe
Gem Spa
St. Mark's Market
Mamoun's
St. Mark's Comics
Cafe Mogador (NOW CLOSED)
St Dymphna's (NOW CLOSED)
Tuck Shop
First Avenue:
The Bean (NOW CLOSED)
McDonald's
Saifee Hardware (NOW CLOSED)
The International
Rite-Aid
First Avenue Pierogi & Deli
Brickman & Sons (NOW CLOSED)
The Neptune
dba
Second Avenue:
Professor Thom's on Second Avenue opens at 5
Bar 82
Kabin on Second Avenue
Moonstruck Diner
Cooper's Craft & Kitchen
Also:
Mud Coffee
9th Street Espresso on East 10th Street
Moishe's Bake Shop
Stage
Liquiteria
Bluebird on East First Street
Veselka (Second Ave. Last seating passed — take out only now Now closed)
Russo's on East 11th Street (NOW CLOSED)
Juice Press on East 10th Street open until 5.
Katz's
Mona's, Josie's and Sophie's will be open for part of the evening
Avenue B:
Happy Wok
Sunny & Annie's
Cornerstone
Duane Reade (rumored to be open around the clock)
Vazac's
Manitoba's
Blackbird
East Second Street:
Il Posto Accanto
Il Bagatto is delivering
East Fifth Street:
Lavagna is serving dinner from 5-10 p.m.
Avenue C:
Associated (Now closed)
Bobwhite
ABC Beer
ABC Wine
Casa Adela
Fine Fare
Cafecito (until 1 a.m.)
Most corner delis are open...
How long any of these places stays open depends on the changing weather conditions...
