EV Grieve Etc.: Mourning edition

Jeremiah visits the Holiday (Jeremiah's Vanishing NY)

The LES as a luxury item (BoweryBoogie)

Hard times at Ray's (Neither More Nor Less)

Jen Carlson interviews EV Grieve favorite Nathan Kensinger (Gothamist)

Three ATMs have been swiped from the LES since Dec. 26 (New York Post)

The New York metropolitan area will lose 181,000 jobs this year -- more than any other region in the country (Associated Press)

Fewer New Yorkers moving out of state (New York Times)

Community comes together after "false prostitution" arrest at Blue Door Video on First Avenue (Gay City News)

Safe-smashing bandits who have been preying on eateries and bars, including a few in the East Village, have been captured (New York Post)

And on the cover of this week's New Yorker...

Met life

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Noted

I'm sure this was done with the best of intentions, but it strikes me as...well, just odd. Sidewalk Cafe, Avenue A and Sixth Street.

Snow on Seventh and B

East Seventh Street and Avenue B.

"It was a gray city, a weary one, an older one"

Novelist Kevin Baker has an op-ed in the Times today. It's about his arrival in NYC in the late 1970s. Here are a few excerpts from the piece titled "New York was so much older then."

It was a dirtier city then, more violent, more interesting — more accessible to poor, eager young people. We lived four and five to a railroad apartment, the bathtub in the kitchen in some places, the floors lined with clumpy chalk lines of boric acid that were our useless defense against the cockroaches.

We feasted on $4 platters of Indian food in restaurants on Sixth Street where you could bring your own wine. We went everywhere by subway, riding in gray, graffiti-covered cars where half the doors didn’t open and a single, sluggish fan shoved the air about on summer nights. We took a cab sometimes, when there were five of us and we could get a Checker, one person riding on the jump seat, staring out at the long avenues of the city.

And:

It was a gray city, a weary one, an older one. There were, in those days, pornographic theaters in good neighborhoods; Bowery-style wino bars with sawdust on the floor on Upper Broadway; prostitutes along West End Avenue slipping into cars with New Jersey license plates. It was a city, too, that seemed to open up into an infinite series of magic boxes, of novelty shops and diners, delicatessens and corner bakeries, used record stores and bookstores.

Like Barack Obama we read everything we could get our hands on. It was a movie-mad town then, and we lined up for hours in the cold on the East Side to see the latest Fassbinder or Fellini, the new Woody Allen. We nailed long, flapping schedules of all the revival houses to our walls, from the Thalia and the New Yorker, Theater 80 St. Marks and the Bleecker Street Cinemas. I saw my first Broadway show, “Equus,” for $3, and sat on stage.

[Photo of the 1970s East Village by Litter Bugged via Filthy Messes.]

Perfectly good things someone is throwing away

On East Seventh Street.

The Holiday Cocktail Lounge lives

Not sure if these signs went up yesterday or today at the Holiday on St. Mark's Place...Good news, nonetheless. If it was open last night...anyone go in for drinks? And hooray finally for some good news.

[UPDATED: Jeremiah stops by for a drink....]

For further reading:

Holiday Cocktail Lounge (Jeremiah's Vanishing NY)

Is the Holiday over? (NYPress)

Meanwhile, don't expect to see this guy at the Holiday then

This is from a post I did last July 8. Seemed like a good time for a rerun:

We were talking about the Holiday Cocktail Lounge on St. Mark's yesterday. I later spotted this user review of the Holiday at Zagat.

Understandable...he probably wants to buy a place at the Theatre Condominiums...

Noted

MAYOR Bloomberg, after presenting his State of the City address at Brooklyn College, crossing the street to Applebee's, where his party of six had burgers and he tipped $20 on a $73 check. (Page Six)

I just hope those burgers didn't have any trans fat...

Work out like Derek Jeter -- for at least seven days

This time of year sports clubs like to make us feel fat (fatter?) and pasty (pastier?). So we'd better join! Anyway, for some reason, I keep getting e-mails from the NEW! Derek Jeter ultra sports club health place thing for a free trial membership. Tempting! But probably not. Seems like a lot of work. Couldn't I just meet him at, oh, say, Butter?

PS
Truth is, I'm holding out for Gwynnie's gym.

Freedom of Choice

For two reasons.

1) It's like 2 degrees out. So let's get warmed up by Devo from the Central Park SummerStage from August 2004. (Oh, sweet, sweet August. How I miss you...) Actually, I don't recall being all that hot this night with the torrential downpour that stopped before Devo came on....

2) "Freedom of Choice" seems right for the pre-Inauguration weekend.

On East Seventh Street: Dessert Row seems a little deserted -- Chocolate Bar has closed

Wow. East Seventh Street, particularly on the north side of the street closer to Avenue A, seemed to be booming there for a bit. No more. Well, first, Locks 'n' Lads, the kiddie hair salon, has closed. Their outgoing message on their answering machine confirms it. Meanwhile, farther east, there's activity next to Butter Lane Cupcakes. A neighbor said this vacant space may just become a ground-floor apartment. Then! The Chocolate Bar has been shuttered the last few days. And don't expect to see it open again. I have it on very good authority that this location is officially closed. (And they just opened to so much hoopla in June.) Finally, the signs for the forthcoming East Village Pie Lounge at 131 E. Seventh St. are gone. Maybe that doesn't mean anything, though the spot has seemingly been dormant. The Pie Lounge was to take over the space that previously housed the short-lived Italian cafe Affettati. What gives here? Recession? Stupidly high rents (still)? The East Village wasn't ready for/didn't want/need more high-end dessert places?

The Chocolate Bar yesterday.




Construction next to Butter Lane Cupcakes.



Locks 'N' Lads no more.



P.S.

Oddly enough, the Chocolate Bar's new Egg Cream was just featured in this week's Page Six Magazine.

Wishful thinking

On Water Street in the Financial District this morning. Only off by four hours and, maybe, 50 degrees.

24 hours...and 99 cents

In a recent post on two old signs that I like, commenter StuyTownFullofYunnies mentioned the flashing neon of the newish coffee shop on 14th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A. I knew that I had a picture of it somewhere. Like StuyTown, I love the flashing "open 24 hours" neon. Anyway, it's proof that a sign doesn't have to be 75 years old to be liked. Or something.



I also like the neon next door at the generally tacky 99-cent shop....

The Voice remembers longtime EV resident Richard Leck

Runnin' Scared had a lovely feature obituary earlier today on Richard Leck, a longtime East Village resident who recently died of heart disease. As Graham Rayman notes:

Leck, 75, was one of that disappearing class of people who make the neighborhood more colorful and more interesting than the yuppie scum who invade this sacred ground and drive up the rents.

Without any relatives, the veteran may have to be buried in Potter's Field.

A note from the EV Grieve Enterprise Virtualizer/Workday Systems Liaison (you know, IT)

Hello.

To recognize the shifting paradigm shifts in the global marketplace, I stupidly changed my URL last month. Anyway, the transition has not gone all that well. Like, for instance, the new URL doesn't seem to work in any RSS feeds. So, after spending my portion of the bailout to solve the problem, I think I have it figured out.

You can use this URL for any RSS thingee: http://feeds.feedburner.com/EvGrieve

Or anything in that new Subscribe Now widget to the right. (Unless if you are looking at this upside down, then it will be on your left.)

Thanks for reading.

EV Grieve

Noted

From The Superficial:

Sarah Jessica Parker wants to cast Britney Spears in the new Sex and the City movie, according to MTV UK:

It seems Britney who made her cameo on US TV show How I Met Your Mother last year would play a young relative of SJP's character Carrie Bradshaw. Sarah Jessica told friends: "My idea is to have someone like Britney Spears move to New York as my cousin or niece and Carrie would show her the ropes."

EV Grieve Etc.: Mourning edition

An East Village resident's apartment proved to be a prized asset when she went to Craigslist in search of a swap near Washington, D.C., for the inauguration. (Daily News)

Jeremiah and Jill both pay their respects to the Old Devil Moon.

WTF at the under-plywood McNally eatery on the Bowery? (BoweryBoogie)

Times Square photo circa 1976. Anyone for Lipstick? (Stupefaction)

About that snowboard ramp in East River Park (City Room)

Humble beginnings for the new year (NYC Taxi Photo)

Good news on the Beacon Theatre renovation (Gothamist)

Meanwhile, in London: Check out some storefronts of various mom-and-pop shops (London Shop Fronts, via BoingBoing)

On new newly appointed New York state chief judge Jonathan Lippman: "Mr. Lippman's childhood friend Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the state Assembly, recounted his boyhood with Justice Lippman their families on Grand Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Mr. Silver recalled that he and Mr. Lippman were bar mitzvahed in the same synagogue and both worked as law secretaries in state Supreme Court early in their legal careers.

"He's now in New York's top judicial post and I am usually on the top pages of the New York Post," Mr. Silver, D-Manhattan, quipped.

When it came time for him to speak, Mr. Lippman looked at Mr. Silver and said, "Two kids from the Lower East Side -- not too shabby." (New York Law Journal)

Recessive economy, high unemployment, falling housing market: What year is this...?

I'm currently reading a rather academic book titled "From Urban Village to East Village: The Battle for New York's Lower East Side." It was first published in 1994. The chief author is Janet L. Abu-Lughod, at the time of the book's release a professor of sociology at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research.

Her section on the the beginning of 1992 is particularly interesting...perhaps you can draw a few parallels to another time in the city. Like now...

The economy of the city also appeared to be going to seed. Recently released data on jobs and unemployment revealed that in 1991 the city had lost jobs at an even faster rate than in the 1975 recession. And these were jobs not only in manufacturing, which had long been deserting Manhattan, but in the services as well. Service job losses, while they began at the high end of the scale when the stock market first tumbled in 1987, were now being translated, through a multiplier effect, into losses within demand sectors that "yuppies" had formerly supported.

Vacancy rates in hotels were rising. It was easier to get a cab, even in bad weather. Reservations were no longer needed at many good restaurants and tickets to concerts and the theater were once again more available. Employees of commercial firms, both high on the ladder and now, in back offices as well, were being let go, and in the interests of reducing municipal and state costs -- and New York City and the State struggled with mounting budget defecits -- the number of public employees was also being reduced. The 1991 Christmas buying season was one of the most disappointing on record.

The bottom was also falling out of the housing market. Real estate agents, never ones to suggest at any time that housing might be a poor investment, were estimating that sale prices on luxury flats in the city had dropped a fourth to a fifth from their peak values in the late 1980s and that there were "real bargains" to be had in rental units, co-ops and condominia. But sellers, even those offering "bargains," reported months without a single buyer nibble. Advertisements in the Sunday real estate section of The New York Times for auctioned residential and commercial units expanded from half a page to several pages, and the lower auction prices established a ceiling beyond which other prospective buyers refused to bid.

The commercial firms in Lower Manhattan, whose job holders were the "white-collar workers" that a walk-to-work gentrifying zone of the East Village was intended to attract, were especially hard hit. Vacancy rates in privately owned buildings soared from under 3 percent in 1981 to over 20 percent in 1991.

In the East Village, although properties were too downscale to warrant private auctions and many residents were already so marginal to the economy that its collapse left them relatively unaffected, the wind was definitely out of the gentrifiers' sails.

The book includes the map of the East Village below...it's included in a section that discusses 1987. (Click to enlarge.)

A sterile new sign for the Blarney Stone

The Blarney Stone on Fulton Street near Nassau in the Financial District is a fine joint for some beers and affordable quality food. And they open at 8 a.m.



Was disappointed, though, to see them recently get new, sterile signage...fits right in with the rest of the neighborhood now. Charmless.



Still haven't been back to the Blarney Stone on Eighth Avenue near the Garden since they ruined that with a remodeling a few years ago...

[Top photo by IrishNYC via Flickr]

Speaking of landmarks and chicken fat, Cindy Adams thinks East Houston has a problem

From her column in the Post yesterday:

NOW, Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber's glamorous glorious gorgeous premiere of "Defiance" at the Landmark Sunshine Theater. Landmarked? The thing should be condemned. Sunshine? Their VIP reception room is a windowless, airless basement. But maybe it's the location that counts. East Houston Street just a vat of chicken fat from Yonah Schimmel's knishery.

Are bag snatchers getting more brazen or are people getting dumber? YOU decide

From the Police Blotter in this week's issue of The Villager:

A woman who put her bag on the corner of the bar at Anchor Bar, 310 Spring St. at Renwick St., during the early hours of Fri., Jan. 2, discovered it was gone when she was ready to leave at 3:30 a.m.

A man who stopped off at Vosges Chocolate, 132 Spring St. between Greene and Wooster Sts., around 4:30 p.m. Sun., Jan. 4, fell asleep at his table and woke to find the backpack that he had placed at his feet was gone.

A woman patron of Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St., told police that her wallet and cell phone were stolen between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. Fri., Jan. 9, while she was on the dance floor. Another woman at Le Poisson Rouge checked her belongings right after the first theft was reported, and discovered that her wallet with an iPod and personal property had been taken from her bag, which she had placed on her table.

EV Grieve Etc.: Mourning edition

Expect more empty storefronts in Manhattan (New York Times)

Bartender wanted ad of the day: "Styled like a hipster Bennigan’s, this Billyburg rock club lets the good times roll." (Hunter-Gatherer)

Upright Citizen's Brigade prepping move to the old Pioneer Theater (Eater)

Biker Bill's first cell phone (Neither More Nor Less)

Jeremiah's favorite film from 2008 (Jeremiah's Vanishing NY)

Morning at the Subway Inn (Greenwich Village Daily Photo)

New city landmarks (City Room)

Virgin closing Times Square location (Idolator via Curbed)

38-hour work weeks at the Hotel Chelsea (Living with Legends)

Allen Street tea shop inches closer toward opening -- now featuring a bright red awning visible from space (BoweryBoogie)

Why aren't there more neighborhood blogs in Manhattan? (Washington Square Park)

The cornerstones of New York (Lost City)

Where are all the ads?

Have you noticed how many blank walls there are around the neighborhood these days...? Buildings that typically always have some sort of banner ads attached?








Easy enough, I suppose, to chalk this up to the recession and downturn in advertising, etc. Could also be the time of year. How many more quality films like My Bloody Valentine 3D can there be to promote? Or maybe there's something else...perhaps the East Village is no longer a hot demographic area that advertisers want to target.

In any event, no complaints here about the lack of ads.

A faded ad on 57th and Fifth

Speaking of ads, this past holiday season I found myself in Midtown...I'd never noticed this faded spot at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue for the Greenwich Savings Bank...



For a better look, I braved the crowd at Tiffany & Co. and headed to customer service on the sixth floor.



I like the private little phone stalls in customer service. Plenty of space to call your bookie.