Happy 100th birthday John's of 12th Street

Just got a press release announcing that East Village mainstay John's of 12th Street "is celebrating their 100th year anniversary on Thursday, Oct. 23 by rolling back the prices on their menu to approximations of those available in 1908."

The release included a few historical tidbits. Like!

During prohibition Momma John kept a "hootch" still in the backyard behind the kitchen and made wine in the basement. John opened a speakeasy upstairs and patrons would enter through the restaurant, where he served Momma John's brews in espresso cups in case of a raid. To celebrate the end of prohibition, John put candles on each of the tables in the restaurant and started the wax candelabra which is still in use and being added to nightly in the back room.

And celebrities!

Patrons though the years include an eclectic range of bold face names including Jackie Kennedy (who brought her young family in for spaghetti dinners), Ben Stiller (who dines with his parents), Pete Townsend (lore has it he sketched the idea for Tommy on a napkin), Christian Slater (who had his 9th birthday party in the restaurant's back room), Tom Cruise (who initially went unrecognized and waited patiently for a table for an hour), and Kelly Ripa (her first date with now husband Mark Conseulo was at John's).

Noted

NYU was recently ranked 15th by Global Language Monitor as one of the most mentioned universities in print and electronic media, beating out the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern University and Georgetown University, among others. The study measures university appearance through every accessible database, including print, electronic media and the blogosphere.
Columbia University, however, snagged the number two spot in the study.

(Washington Square News)

NYC on the record(s)

Yesterday, I had a post on revisiting the "Physical Graffiti" cover art 33 years later.

Somehow I've managed to missed the ongoing NYC album art posts at Gothamist. Here, Gothamist proves a little background on how NYC played a prominent role on an album cover...They've covered everyone from Dylan...the New York Dolls...to the Strokes and the Beastie Boys. Good stuff.

[Updated: Alex has video from an MSNBC report on "the death of album cover art.]

Noise, then darkness

Stevengyang posted this video on YouTube titled "235 East 13th Street." Here's the description:

This is a video of the construction that has gone on around us over the past year. The construction has turned our bedroom window into a concrete wall. The wall is so close we can touch it. At then end you see how dark the room is even at 3 pm during the day. At least its not as loud anymore.

Ugh. What a nightmare. Mrs. Grieve and I moved out of an apartment on the LES around the time when rumors were circulating that the empty lot next door was becoming a six-story building with retail on the ground level. Sure enough, there's now a spiffy new apartment building on that space. We had five windows in that apartment, including three that faced the lot. The apartment was dingy as it was -- can't imagine what it would be like now.

Perhaps developers should be sentenced to live in apartments next to their construction zones to experience all this firsthand.

Previously on EV Grieve:
The dog days of summer

A New View of the Lower East Side (I'll say!)

Meanwhile, the above post made me curious about the 19-story Ludlow Hotel rising on, uh, Ludlow, right behind The Ludlow. (Clever, these names!) What do you do if you forked over money for a space in The Ludlow with nice southern exposures...which will soon be exposed to a 170-room hotel? (And what about The Ludlow's slogan: "A New View of the Lower East Side...")



Curbed had this shot last month:



Haven't seen mention of the new hotel at The Ludlow site.

They should really update their Web site, too. None of the images reflect the new construction going on next door. Seems a little misleading to me...

Nancy Spungen 30 years later

New York magazine has this feature this week:

The Day Punk Died
Thirty years ago this month, the death of Nancy (of Sid &) effectively ended New York’s early punk scene. It’s been easy to hate her since — maybe too easy

In the article, Karen Schoemer speaks with Legs McNeil, among others. She interviews him at the Yaffa Cafe. I love how the article ends:

Legs McNeil doesn’t live in New York City anymore. He bought a house in rural Pennsylvania and doesn’t relish his return visits. He’s now a recovered alcoholic wearing a black Hawaiian shirt decorated with pictures of exotic cocktails and pegged black jeans 30 years out of fashion. He wants his old New York. He glances at a girl in slutty Sex and the City clothes that aren’t slutty anymore, talking on her cell phone while her dining companion gazes patiently into space. The sight brings out a little of his old fire. “I don’t know who the fuck they’re talking to,” he sneers. “Are they talking to other people in restaurants eating breakfast?” Where’s Nancy when you need her? She would have hated it here. She wouldn’t have lasted a minute.

Here's the Sid and Nancy heroin interview from the punk documentary D.O.A.

Noted (ZOMG edition)

Yes, yes...several people have told me that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are living in the East Village while she is appearing on Broadway...at the American Felt Building on 13th Street near Fourth Avenue. (Or maybe not!) No shortage of photos of Tom and daughter Suri on the street...here they are on Fourth Avenue via the Vulture.


[Photo by Flynet Pictures]

14 year old against Bloomy's third term (no matter where she may actually go to school)

LimeWire has the following post on Rachel Trachtenburg:

At 14 years old, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players drummer (and daughter of its singer/guitar player Jason and costumer/slideshow operator Tina) is already playing a more active role in local politics than most of us ever will.

New Yorkers are, by now, familiar with the proposal to extend term limits and allow our mayor, Michael Bloomberg, to run for the city's highest office a third time. As part of the process, the city council is now holding public hearings, allowing citizens to argue for or against the plan. On Thursday, Rachel spoke to the council, making the case against allowing Bloomberg to seek a third term.

In her testimony, Rachel told the council that, because Bloomberg raised taxes to give money to the Yankees and move the fountain in Washington Square Park slightly (and continuously sided with landlords on rent stabilization and affordable housing issues, I might add), her family was priced out of their East Village home. Now, they live in Bushwick, where their friends are often mugged at gunpoint. "Any monkey can raise taxes," says Rachel. "No offense to monkeys."

Meanwhile, BushwickBK.com has an important addition to the story:

A minute of research shows that Rachel is enrolled in school in SEATTLE — which means her family’s apartment in New York is at best a business necessity and at worst a luxury or status item, even if it is now in Bushwick. Boo. Hoo.

Physical Graffiti 33 years later

From the WOW Report (via BoingBoing):

Artist Lou Cannizzaro went back to 96 St Marks Place in Manhattan 33 years after that location starred on the cover of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti album. Robert Plant should have aged so well.

Wikipedia has this about the cover art:

The album's sleeve design features a photograph of a New York City tenement block, with interchanging window illustrations. The album designer, Peter Corriston, was looking for a building that was symmetrical with interesting details, that was not obstructed by other objects and would fit the square album cover. He said:

We walked around the city for a few weeks looking for the right building. I had come up a concept for the band based on the tenement, people living there and moving in and out. The original album featured the building with the windows cut out on the cover and various sleeves that could be placed under the cover, filling the windows with the album title, track information or liner notes.

The two buildings photographed for the album cover are located at 96 and 98 St. Mark's Place in New York City. But to enable it to fit, the building (which is actually a five-story building) had to be cropped out. So for the album cover it became a four-story building instead. The buildings used on the cover were the same that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were filmed in front of in the Rolling Stones music video "Waiting on a Friend."

Erection '08 and other political fliers

Much as already been made about NYC artist Ron English's Obama/Lincoln fusion portraits...(this one on Avenue C near Seventh Street).



Meanwhile, more and more of Jenny's Palin creations are now popping up in the neighborhood...(this one at 13th Street and Second Avenue)



And this is my first sighting of Ron English's McCain/Viagra ad (this one on Seventh Street and Avenue C)...They appeared in Los Angeles in the spring.

Now we're dealing

This is the first flier I've seen since the Great Depression of 2008 started in which potential tenants are being offered something for free...like one month's rent.

Noted

From the Ivana-logues in Page Six Magazine this weeek:

My husband Rossano left for Honduras last week (don't ask me where that is) and I am not a happy camper. He's doing a TV show called L'Isola dei Famosi, which means "Island of the Famous." It's the Italian version of Survivor but with celebrities. I am freaking out! He's going into the jungle where you can get all kinds of diseases, and he went through a thousand pills and malaria shots. For some reason the show asked me to send his wedding tux to this hotel in Honduras. I said, "You think I'm going to send a $10,000 Dolce & Gabbana suit to Honduras? UPS takes like three weeks. It's never going to arrive because somebody will steal it." Countries like that are beautiful but they are very poor, OK? So I am passing on that. Rossano is just looking for adventure. But I am really slightly worried. In the jungle there are no mobile phones, no computers and no cigarettes, but there are plenty of tarantulas, cockroaches and snakes. I hate those slimy things. I can deal with the sharks on Wall Street and the barracudas on Madison Avenue, but this is really too much. And I honestly cannot see Rossano eating snakes unless it is smoked eel at Nobu.

At the Domino Sugar Refinery

By now, there are likely thousands of photos posted around the internets from the open house (factory?) at the Domino Sugar Refinery earlier today. (Every person I saw there had a camera.) So here are a few more shots. As you probably know, developers want to turn this iconic factory from the 1880s north of the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn into pricy condos and what not. Neighborhood activists wants to see the riverfront property preserved and redeveloped as affordable housing.
















(No one was allowed inside, of course. Still! Here's what it looks like from that vantage point.)

Lousy economy preventing people from overpaying for Yankees memorabilia

The last ball hit out of Yankee Stadium, courtesy of Jose Molina, was one of several big ticket items that failed to sell in early bidding yesterday at Madison Square Garden on a trove of Yankees artifacts. It was expected to fetch up to $400,000, but was pulled after offers fell short of the suggested opening bid of $100,000. (espn.com)

Nice furniture that won't look right in an East Village apartment

In this week's Habitats in the Times, a couple struggles to find the right apartment for their unique furniture, particularly an antique mahogany table she was going to inherit from her grandmother:

It certainly wasn’t going to look right in one of those swaths of raw space near St. Marks Place or in any of the other 138 spaces, downtown and uptown, that the couple checked out in the course of a year in the mid-1990s.

The Sheraton-style table required just the right setting, as did the circa 1790 Hepplewhite serpentine-front sideboard. So, apparently, did Ms. Houlgrave, 46, a model who has worked for Glamour, Vogue and Self magazines, and who has a second career as a wedding and fashion photographer.

“I didn’t want to live in the stinky East Village,” she said with characteristic directness. “It was so unattractive. I am from Richmond, Virginia.”

The couple now lives on the Upper West Side.

An EV Grieve FYI -- in case you were going to buy a shitload of FroYo today at 16 Handles

The guy who decorated the new bar in edgy Alphabet City

The real estate section in the Post this week includes a profile of renowned interior designer Carleton Varney. He designed the fancy new cocktail lounge Ella, 9 Ave. A, in the Lower East Village -- as its owners refer to the area -- that serves $12 cocktails. (Reservations are referral only.) Here's a passage from the Post:

Later, down in edgy Alphabet City, a rather different crowd raised the roof at the public unveiling of Varney's latest design project, a duplex cocktail lounge and piano bar called Ella.

At first glance, Varney, 69, hardly seems an obvious choice to decorate a bar on Avenue A. As chronicled in "Houses in My Heart," the designer built his considerable reputation working in far more upscale enclaves.

Previously on EV Grieve:
New bar on Avenue A has pianos, fancy drinks and referral-only reservations

Fall skies

The sky is not falling.

A Fucked Up cover

Fucked Up and, urp, Moby cover the Ramones...part of Fucked Up's 12-hour show at Rogan on Bowery and Bond Tuesday.



[Via Stereogum]

BOA not DOA

What bank branch glut? Esquared reports that there's a new Bank of America branch opening Monday on Canal and Broadway. Say goodbye to the vendors and makeshift stores on the northeast corner.