Was running a few errands around Union Square yesterday morning. Started talking to one store employee who mentioned that he lived on 6th Street between Avenue A and B...and he asked if I saw all the police cars on 6th and A early yesterday. I hadn't. He said cops and news crews were everywhere...and that one passer-by told him it was a double murder. Before I could say anything, he offered. "It's a really nice neighborhood." A pause. "There's no regard for human life these days." I went home to check this out. I didn't see a thing about this on any news site. Later yesterday, I heard from a few other folks that there was a shooting outside Sing Sing Karaoke on Avenue A around 3 a.m. The Daily News has this account:
A bouncer at an East Village bar called Sing Sing Karaoke took a bullet to the chest early Saturday after breaking up a series of melees, police and witnesses said.
As someone belted out Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" on stage, Carlos Salome staggered into the bar around 3 a.m. screaming that he'd been shot.
"He was yelling, 'My arm, my arm!'" said playwright Marissa Kamin, who was inside Sing Sing at the time of the shooting.
Salome was in stable condition at Bellevue Hospital.
The bouncer had been standing outside the singalong spot at 81 Avenue A when two groups of drunks began brawling, witnesses said. "He whipped out his security badge," said a worker at a neighboring bar.
After going their separate ways, the beer-muscled brawlers returned, the worker said, and the bouncers stepped in again. Two of the men walked by the bar a few minutes later, he said. "They walked to the corner and started shooting," he said.
No arrests have been made in the shooting outside Sing Sing, which lists a song by the rapper 2 Pistols atop its list of new tunes and counts celebrities like Cameron Diaz among its customers.
"[Carlos] had good intentions," the worker said. "He didn't want to fight those guys."
[An aside: Was it necessary to mention that someone was singing "Tiny Dancer" ... and that the place has a song by 2 Pistols on its playlist?]
I'd like to know a few more details on the case (and not who was singing what...) and the aftermath. Perhaps Bob Arihood was able to capture some of this?
Ah, yes -- one of my favorite neighborhood traditions kicks off this Friday afternoon on 7th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. (Been saving up my $1 bills for Chuk-a-Luck all year!) Community spirit at its finest.
I was wondering how long it would take for someone to deface these hideous ads for Rum. Not bad, people. Oh, why do you know they're selling rum? Because the women are all wearing bikinis and making suggestive faces. Duh.
Lots of good stuff in The Observer this week. (And why does my copy arrive Thursday or sometimes Friday? I know I can read it every day online. Still.) The headline to a piece by Choire Sicha asks, "Who's Running New York? The Council sinks, rents rise, few notice." Indeed. He has a nice account of the New York City Rent Guidelines Board meeting from this past Monday, particularly an impromptu speech by Adriene Holder, a Legal Aid attorney and tenant representative.
“First of all,” she said, “I want to know where everybody is.” There were not so many folks there! When confidence in city government runs low, the people abscond.
“The tenants are here but not in the number that you would expect,” Ms. Holder said, “given how important this situation is, and how dire this is to what’s going to happen to tenants here in New York City. Perhaps they’re not here because they’re still working; perhaps they’re not here because they’re working their second job; maybe they’re not here because they’re discouraged, they’re disappointed; and maybe they’re not here because they’ve become weary of a process that guarantees that there’s going to be an increase.
“Increasingly, what we are seeing is two different cities,” Ms. Holder said. “We’re seeing a city that’s becoming increasingly rich, and a city that’s becoming increasingly poor, and a middle or moderate class that is moving away from the city.”
This week's issue also features a terminallly ill singer facing possible eviction from the Chelsea Hotel. Read it here. If you haven't already.
Stereogum (and several other sites, actually) had the news yesterday about the 2008 Village Voice Siren Festival. Here's the good-looking lineup thus far:
Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks Broken Social Scene The Helio Sequence Beach House Times New Viking Jaguar Love The Dodos Annuals Film School Parts & Labor Dragons Of Zynth These Are Powers
I went to the very first Siren Festival in 2001. And it was ungodly crowded. Too many stupid people there for the show. There was a line for Ruby's; people visiting it for the first time started acting as if they owned the place. Regardless! Seeing the festival lineup (I thought last year was it, to be honest) gives me hope for at least one more fairly normal summer at Coney Island, eating more expensive hot dogs at Nathan's and having beers at Ruby's. (They managed to eek out one more summer, right?) I don't know what's going to happen with this whole ridiculous development being bandied about. Still. But I plan on enjoying every moment I'm at Coney Island this summer.
Meanwhile, Gothamist has details on the May 22 rally to save Coney Island from the evil Thor Equities.
Looks as if street festival season has started up again...Third Avenue between 14th Street and, I'm guessing, 23rd Street was closed off last Saturday. Counted seven of them taking place in Manhattan this coming weekend. (That's SEVEN opportunities to buy four Gap T-shirts for $10 Or bags of tube socks! Or quickie back rubs!) Do these offer any benefit to the local community? I've never heard anyone actually say they look forward to a street festival -- or even admit actually going to one. I'm all for things to bring the community together (such as the various rummage and porch sales different blocks have), but just not the street fairs that seem to peddle the same crap weekend after weekend throughout the spring and summer.
Jeremiah has the scoop that the Tower of Toys is coming down at the community garden at Sixth Street and Avenue B. This, of course, is the work of the late Eddie Boros, a lifelong resident of the East Village...not to mention a legendary regular at Sophie's. (A lot of his artwork still adorns the bar.) Mrs. Grieve and I just had a conversation about the tower over the weekend. The garden had an open, uh, garden on Saturday and Sunday. In the short time that I was there, I'd say some 20 tourists walked by and took admiring photos of Eddie's creation. However much we liked the sculpture, we wondered how much longer it would be part of the garden. (Eddie passed away in April 2007.) For starters, there was the community garden politics: Many people involved there hated the thing. Here's an article from The New York Times dated Nov. 22, 1998, by Karen Angel:
Junk Art Roils a Garden The junk sculpture on Sixth Street and Avenue B looms above the surrounding tenements like a psychedelic treehouse. From its limbs of raw lumber hang a huge headless Godzilla, a gold mannequin with a horse's head, stuffed animals and other motley objects. For the community garden that houses Eddie Boros's growing sculpture, it has become a source of controversy along with the artist himself, a self-described alcoholic and trash picker who finds his materials in garbage cans and Dumpsters.
Mr. Boros, 66, began building on a 4-by-8-foot garden plot about 15 years ago, as a form of protest. He had been using the vacant land to make carvings, and when the Sixth and B Community Garden was organized, the founders wanted to relegate him to one plot. "I decided to build a little open shed," he said. "I was going up 10 feet, and something started in me. I went up 15 feet, 25 feet." Now the sculpture is about 65 feet tall and occupies six garden plots, and he plans to take it 5 feet higher.
"Eddie is building out of anger," said David Rouge, a founder of the garden. "He has never accepted the authority of the garden." Seven years ago Mr. Rouge led an unsuccessful effort to evict the sculpture. He had to settle for a ruling that forbade Mr. Boros from making it bigger. But Mr. Boros follows his muse, not the ruling.
The sculpture often elicits debate among garden members. "There are these wild raucous meetings with screaming," said Karen Schifano, founder of the garden's mediation committee.
Jimmy Dougherty, a garden member and a film maker, said that most members are defenders of the sculpture. "People are either repulsed by the sculpture, or they think it's beautiful," said Mr. Dougherty, who did a documentary about Mr. Boros that was broadcast on PBS stations this year. Because the sculpture elicits such strong reactions, he said, "it's a successful art piece."
Mr. Boros often climbs to the top of his sculpture. "He sits up there like a pirate in a crow's-nest surveying the neighborhood," Ms. Schifano said. "This is one of the last vestiges of the anarchistic, crazy Lower East Side."
As Jeremiah notes, you can pay your respects: "Before it's gone, come to An Informal Celebration of the Tower of Toys, Sunday, May 11, 7pm - 9pm at the 6th Street & Avenue B Community Garden."
Anyway, another day, another piece of the neighborhood's soul is lost.
[A reader on Curbed pointed out this video from 1988:]
Ha on that headline. Anyway, for whatever reasons, the editors at Time Out New York thought it would be a good idea to ask New Yorkers to strip for this week's issue. And there were plenty of volunteers. See for yourself. (Really NSFW.)
That headline is from the intro voiceover in the first video here, a spot for Gold Medal flour from the early 1960s. (What can we take away from this ad? That a woman only needed a bag of flour to be happy...?) Here are several other vintage NYC-related TV commercials from the 1970s and 1980s...
The board that regulates rents for New York City’s one million rent-stabilized apartments proposed a tentative range of increases Monday night that could lead to larger increases than last year’s.
The city’s Rent Guidelines Board recommended increases of 3.5 percent to 7 percent for one-year leases and 5.5 percent to 9.5 percent for two-year leases. The nine-member board will hold two public hearings on June 11 and June 16 and is scheduled to set a final number, not a range, at a meeting on June 19.
The proposed range of increases apply to leases renewed between Oct. 1, 2008, and Sept. 30, 2009.
The board’s 5-to-4 vote left both tenant advocates and landlord representatives equally disappointed. A landlord group had called for higher increases, while tenant leaders, many of whom are pushing for substantive reform of the rent-stabilization system, supported a proposal by some board members for a rent freeze.
“I’m afraid it’s going to be higher than last year’s increase, and last year’s increase was way too high as it was,” said Barry Soltz, 51, the legal coordinator for the tenant association at the rent-stabilized Janel Towers in the Bronx. He was one of a few dozen tenant advocates at the meeting, which had a low turnout compared to previous years.
With so much at stake, the board's meeting at Cooper Union in the East Village drew the sparsest crowd in recent memory. It lasted just an hour.
"I want to know where everybody is," said Adriene Holder, one of two tenant representatives on the nine-member board, as she scanned an audience of less than 100 in a room that could hold five times as many.
Afterward, Holder said tenants stayed away because they've come to view the entire process as "a sham."
