Many people are trying to hook up right now...and we're watching, so to speak

What happens when you mash Google maps with Craigslist Casual Encounters? Hookupmaps show where the, uh, hookups are happening right now. (Via BuzzFeed)

So who's trying to hook up right now in the East Village...?

For the record

Oh, hello! So don't mind me or Alex here. We're just having a little fun picking out some album covers that feature NYC.

So I'm starting with an easy one...Blondie's "Autoamerican" from 1980.



And I can't say that I'm much of a Gloria Gaynor fan, though I dig the cover to her "Park Avenue Sound" record from 1978.

Historic church on Second Street plans its ruin

Rob at Save the Lower East Side! brings us some troubling news on the development front for the neighborhood. Among the approved projects: The Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection and Chapel of St. Innocent of Irkutsk on Second Street is planning to add eight residential stories to its current 60-foot height. WTF?

Forget James Cramer and his ilk, how would Joey Ramone invest in this troubled market?

Given our recessive economy, Theresa K. at Punk Turns 30 asks a sensible question, Where is stock market wiz Joey Ramone when you need him? Indeed! As she notes, "While Joey Ramone made his mark in public singing songs like 'Teenage Lobotomy' and 'Cretin Hop' and seeming to endorse a loser way of life . . . in reality, he was very well aware of his stock portfolio. Yes, the man had investments. He was no dummy although he played one on (m)TV."

This article in the Guardian UK from July 2006 examines the friendship Ramone struck with the Money Honey, CNBC's Maria Bartiromo. At first, though, she igonored his e-mails when they first appeared in 1998. Probably just another weirdo!

After a while though, curiosity got the better of her and Bartiromo, arguably the most recognisable business journalist in the United States, replied. "I started getting e-mails from him and he would say Maria, what do you think about Intel or what do you think about AOL and I thought who is this person emailing me? It's crazy, he's calling himself Joey Ramone," she recalls. "Sure enough it was him and we developed this friendship. And he was attuned to the markets. He really understood his own investment portfolio. Joey Ramone was a fantastic investor."

Ramone, of course, also wrote the song "Maria Bartiromo," which appeared on 2002's "Don't Worry About Me," the first posthumous release to come from his estate.

As the song goes:

What's happening on Wall Street
What's happening at the stock exchange
I want to know
What's happening on Squawk Box
What's happening with my stocks
I want to know
I watch you on the TV every single day
Those eyes make everything OK
I watch her every day
I watch her every night
She's really out of sight
Maria Bartiromo
Maria Bartiromo
Maria Bartiromo

Bartiromo had this to say about the track:

"He said to me Maria, I wrote a song about you and he said just come down to CBGBs in Manhattan, be there at midnight. I said, Joey, I'm sorry to tell you but I have to be on the air at 6am and I can't be anywhere at midnight except in my bed, so I didn't go." Instead, at Ramone's urging, she sent a camera crew. "Sure enough, the cameraman came back with the tape and there's him and his band with this song Maria Bartiromo and I just love it. It's a tremendous tribute. I just love that. It's great, just great."

Here are two versions of the song....the first with some Money Honey cheesecake...

An erection year cover up?

The McCain/Erection '08 poster I saw this past weekend on Seventh Street and Avenue C...



...has been replaced...



Conspiracy theories anyone?

OK, I think we get it...

Avenue A near 12th Street.

Hanging out on St. Mark's Place

Another view of the coming recession

Last Tuesday, Jeremiah had a post with a photo of "the recession" graffiti at the "coming soon" Capital One branch on 8th Street and University. Meanwhile, I just saw the front page of last Friday's Washington Square News:



I really like this shot by WSN photog Ben Norman. Perhaps this will be one of the iconic images of this time in NYC...

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