Gold's Gym Crunched

There was a Gold's Gym on John Street in the Financial District....then one day a few months back, it disappeared behind some plywood, and gymgoers had to enter through a different doorway...and then overnight this week it became a Crunch.

A note from EV Grieve about spring cleaning. And stuff.

Hello. In keeping with the spirit of the season, I did some spring cleaning. Specifically in the drafts section in the EV Grieve archives, where I was horrified to find 228 half-written posts taking up space. Some of them are just dated. Some of them just weren't quite working. So I posted a few of them anyway. Which explains all the nonsense going on below this post. Now what to do with the other 217 or so drafts...

Posts that I never got around to posting: The red zebra sweater

On Seventh Street between Avenue A and Avenue B. [Oops...it was between Avenue B and Avenue C...]

Posts that I never got around to posting: ConEd blows its 2009 budget on plastic sawhorses

10th Street near Avenue B.

Posts that I never got around to posting: The Ludlow from Boca Chica

Posts that I never got around to posting: Bus ads that cover a lot of the bus

On Park Row downtown.

Posts that I never got around to posting: What's new on 53rd Street between Park and Lexington?

A Derek Jeter fitness center and a bank. Which kind of seem to go together.

Posts that I never got around to posting: Missing paintings

Avenue C at Third Street. Wonder if they were found.

Posts that I never got around to posting: The hi life

On Second Avenue.

Posts that I never got around to posting: U2, Depeche Mode haters

Posts that I never got around to posting: Ryan's moved its door

On Second Avenue near Ninth Street. Very important news!

Posts that I never got around to posting: What could have been!

Heh.

Posts that I never got around to posting: This passage from someone's blog from a long time ago

After dinner, my girls took me to Bowery Wine Company. Bowery Wine Company is a really cute, smallish bar. A group of guys bought us all tequila shots as soon as we walked in the bar. We spent the rest of the night there talking, laughing and drinking lots of lots of shots. We stayed until about 3am and then decided to head home.

Former Two Boots Video store "in contract" -- largest available retail space on Avenue A

Last September, Two Boots Video consolidated their remaining stock and moved it into a corner of the Two Boots Pizzeria on Avenue A and Third Street.

Meanwhile, it was reported in January that the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre was taking over the former Two Boots Pioneer Theater space at 155 E. Third St. that closed in November. (The CB3 approved their liquor license in January.) According to the Tower Brokerage site, the old Pioneer is in contract...

As is the former space for Two Boots Video on Avenue A...





Details on the site:

44 Avenue A - Retail Space (Corner East 3rd Street)
Over 20 ft. frontage on Avenue A. High ceilings, floor to ceiling glass, H.V.A.C.
Approx. 2,335 sq. ft. -$75 per sq. ft.!!
In Contract!! -- $14,600/mo

42 Avenue A - Built Out Store (East Village)
Great Built Out Store with Selling Basement
Approx. 550 sq. ft.
In Contract!!
$7,000/mo.

The two properties are listed separately and as one unit on the Tower Brokerage site:

Prime Avenue A - Largest Retail Available On The Avenue!!
Approx. 2970 sq. ft. Can be divided!
In Contract!!
$19,500mo

So is one tenant taking the entire space? Or are the Uptight Citizens Brigaders taking over this space and the Pioneer Theater?

On Feb. 20, Jeremiah reported that a "'giant restaurant'" is moving in to the former video space and Pioneer Theater and the basement. We heard Upright Citizens Brigade was taking over the Pioneer, and they've applied for a beer and wine license. Could they also be a ginormous L-shaped restaurant that will run from Avenue A to Third St?'"

Avenue C for change?

As I mentioned on April 20, yarn/fabric/gaming shop Olivo's on Avenue C near Fourth Street was closing. Elias Olivo, whose father opened the shop 36 years ago, told me recently that they're simply closing because business has been bad. While the new lease had a modest increase, he said they just couldn't make the business profitable any longer. Olivo said they would remain open for several more weeks.

Meanwhile, I wonder what will happen on this southern stretch of Avenue C. The eastern block between Seventh Street and Sixth Street has a newish high-end wine shop, a soon-to-open brickoven pizza joint called Mr. C's and two vacant storefronts advertising "luxurious" apartments and retail space.

What else is happening on Avenue C?

Fine Fair got a new paint job.



There are several empty storefronts on the west side of Avenue C between Sixth Street and Second Street...





And as I've speculated before, how long before the south side of C at Third Street looks like the north side?



And 272 E. Third St. is now for rent. It has been refurbished to house a doctor's office. (Rent: $4,950 a month.)



One last thing... Yoli (pictured at the left above), a delicious hole-in-the-wall Dominican restaurant with three tables, was closed last night when I walked by... Hope that's not a bad sign...

For further reading on EV Grieve:
What's happening at the Umbrella House?

Meanwhile, there's that mysterious hole in the empty space at Sixth Street and Avenue C next to the church

The hole has been there for a few months now... long enough for weeds to start growing in the dirt.

Also on Avenue C: Caffe Pepe Rosso is for sale

That place on Avenue C and Eighth Street that used to be the great Hispanic bakery...




It's for sale via Tower Brokerage.

Pepe Rosso cut back their hours in February.

Bars/retail spots that have been sold/are for sale: Ludlow Guitars, 210 Rivington

While continuing to poke around the Tower Brokerage site...Not sure how long these have been listed.

There's quite a list, though...Such as:

As for rentals: The Ludlow Guitars space is available for $16,000 a month...



For sale: (and in contract) The old Silver Revolver at 210 Rivington.



Plus plenty more storefronts that you've seen around with the big yellow Tower Brokerage signs...and an unnamed bar on Avenue C:

Bar For Sale - Avenue C!
Approx. 1,100 sq. ft. with Backyard, Full Kitchen & Full Liquor License!
Price: $100,000...Rent: $7,500/mo...10-year lease.

For further reading:
East Village portfolio (Jeremiah's Vanishing NY)

Where you can still get a beer, some bikini action and maybe a colonic in this town

Damn...I missed this. Just read over at Esquared's that Deno's Bikini Bar on Seventh Avenue (at 10th Street) has closed.

Need to get back to their main spot on Eighth Avenue (at 30th Street)... a fine place...Maybe throw back a few beers and zip upstairs for a colonic. (Uh, clarification — there's a Colon Hydrotherapy spa on the second floor of this building...per the sign above "bikini bar"...)

Life at 98 Bowery: 1969-1989

Marc H. Miller enjoys telling stories through pictures, something he has done during his career as an educator, writer, photographer and museum curator.

Late last year, Miller, the founder and director of Ephemera Press, launched 98 Bowery: 1969-1989 — View From the Top Floor. The content-rich Web site is a pictorial account of Miller's life in a 2,000-square-foot loft space at 98 Bowery and of the broader creative community that flourished in the Lower East Side from 1969 to 1989.

As he notes on the site: "'View from the Top Floor'" brings together some of these stories in a chronicle of my life and the creative world I experienced during the 20 years I lived ... at 98 Bowery."

Last spring, Miller was preparing to move to Brooklyn Heights after 20 years of living in Park Slope. In his basement, he found dozens of long-forgotten boxes containing photos and other documents from his years on the Bowery.

A portrait of Miller by Carla Dee Ellis circa 1969



In a Q-and-A with EV Grieve done via e-mail, Miller talks about launching 98Bowery.com, his days on the Bowery and his view of the LES today.

When did the 98 Bowery site launch?

The 98 Bowery Web site just naturally happened. There was all this material about events that had seemed so important in the 1970s and 80s; things that I had totally repressed and forgotten. I just felt compelled to get it out again. Everything about the site — the name, the content, the way it’s organized — was totally clear right from the start. The site really started moving last December when a young Web designer, Haoyan of America, began helping me. It is now about two-thirds complete. It has become a very compulsive thing. I just want to finish it. It has been very liberating.

What originally drew you to living on the Bowery?

In the late 1960s, it was totally impossible to find a place in New York. My friend John Wilmer, who moved to New York from California at the same time I did to study at the School of Visual Arts, found a short sublet at 96 Bowery and heard that 98 was going to be rented out to artists. He was the one who originally signed the lease but it took so long for the landlord Sol Fried to get the place legalized that John gave up and returned to California.

By that time I was living with a painter, Carla Dee Ellis, and we jumped at the chance of getting the loft. We were living in a tiny apartment on Thompson Street. It was all about getting space then. We were from California. Carla grew up in the desert near Palm Springs where her back yard extended all the way to the horizon. But in the end what was really great about the loft was not just the space but that it was our entry point into the art world. 98Bowery.com is about a social network.

Harry Mason at Harry's Bar



Your site includes a section with photos of Harry Mason, proprietor of Harry's Bar, which was located on the ground floor at 98 Bowery. What is your favorite memory from Harry's Bar?

In the late 1970s my partner Bettie Ringma was working as a tour guide. When the tour buses came down Bowery she always pointed out where we lived and talked about the men on the street. One time, right before Thanksgiving, a German tourist gave her $50 to get a turkey for the patrons of Harry’s Bar. Bettie cooked the turkey and brought it downstairs where it was well-received. We learned though that most of the men at the bar were so far gone physically they could barely eat. Harry’s Bar was not a place that you really want to romanticize. That night when we watched the news on television there was a story about Cardinal O’Connor serving turkey three blocks down at the Bowery Mission. I couldn’t help but feel that Bettie and the German tourist made a better story.

You spent two years in Holland from 1979-1981. Was there a noticeable difference to the Bowery upon your return?

When we returned in 1981 the whole East Village thing was beginning to happen. It was sort of like a generational switch. All of the young artists who were on the outside in the late 1970s were suddenly taking over and being imitated. Those were exciting but also frustrating times. The scene was exploding but it was also being defined by newcomers and distorted in all sorts of unexpected ways.

I recently saw an issue of the East Village Eye from around 1982 with a cartoon cover about the death of Punk Magazine by John Holmstrom, one of the magazine’s founders. The cartoon showed John and his cohort Legs McNeil sitting on a street corner looking depressed in their late-70s-style black leather jackets. All around them are people with Mohawks and wild, animal patterned outfits. The caption reads, “Well Legs, I guess we blew it.” During the early 1980s, I became involved with the Lower East Side gallery ABC No Rio, wrote a column for the East Village Eye and did video interviews for a video magazine on art, ART/new york.

Captain Sensible of the Damned with Bettie Ringma at CBGB



What are your thoughts on the Bowery as you see it today?

[The late] Marcia Tucker was a classmate of mine in graduate school and I’m really glad to see the New Museum grow so large and move to the Bowery. I’m also impressed with Ethan Swan’s Bowery Artist Tribute at the New Museum and the map of Bowery artists they created for the Internet. It was when I started pulling together some pictures and information for that project and was interviewed by Ethan on video about my experiences on the Bowery that I actually began my 98Bowery Web site.

What do you want people who visit 98Bowery.com to take away from the site?

The site is my story and the story of people I knew and worked with. It’s also unavoidably a small lens on the bigger downtown art and music scene in the 1970s and 1980s. During those years, I had no doubt that I was at the heart of the action, and I want people to see things as I experienced them. History can be very selective but it can also be nudged along by good story telling. That’s what I try to do with the site. Some of the events and some of the people are fairly well-known. Others are less so. Hopefully the site will give people a bigger picture of those years.

I’m also hopeful that the site will give people a fuller picture of who I am. I’ve lived a varied life. At various times I’ve been an art historian, conceptual artist, photographer, newspaper columnist, magazine journalist, video art interviewer, museum curator and publisher. People usually know me through just one of those identities and those that do know me through multiple identities usually don’t fully understand how they connect.

To me though, it’s all one thing. I like telling stories with pictures. That’s what I do. That’s what I’m doing with the 98Bowery Web site. It brings together new picture stories and picture stories I did previously in many different formats that tell about my world from 1969-1989.

Miller with Al Goldstein