The Times on the Pizza Shop's closing

The Times notes the closing of The Pizza Shop on Avenue A... In a comment to us, co-owner Kevin Cole said that the rent was too high... Per the Times:

But the recession took a toll, as did customers’ continuing exodus to Brooklyn’s cool neighborhoods — and the $11,000 monthly rent. "It's hard to be competitive on this strip, and we just weren't doing the volume anymore," said Kevin Cole, 39, one of the four owners and an experienced pizza maker, as well as the front man for the rock band the Turbo A.C.'s.

I hope that they can find some more affordable space somehwere in the neighborhood to open another shop...we need more places like The Pizza Shop here.

I do not want to know what this cab driver was doing in Extra Place this morning

Pedicabs now officially a profession

Under new citywide regulations that went into effect this weekend, pedicabs must now be insured and inspected for safety. The Times notes how the pedicab biz started hereabouts...

New York City’s pedicab business, by most accounts, began on an East Village side street circa 1995, as a close-knit collective of tricyclists squeezed into a garage next door to the Hells Angels. Tap dancers, undertakers and striptease artists were among the first drivers.

But as the business grew, so did its troubles. Hundreds of new bike operators arrived, pestering tourists and testing the city’s tolerance.

Thank you...come again...

As our friend Karate Boogaloo would say, "Just because."

The Au Pairs from 1981.

Reminder: Benefit for the Lower Eastside Girls Club tomorrow

A very worthwhile missive from our inbox...

On Saturday November 21st from Noon to 3:30 PM, join host and MC Cemi Guzman at The Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery at 1st Street, F Train to 2nd Avenue), for a celebration of the work of The Lower Eastside Girls Club of New York.

Following in the footsteps of his father, actor and activist Luis Guzman, Cemi is producing this fundraising event as his high school senior year Capstone Project. “This is a way for me to honor my family’s Lower East Side roots and support a really exciting youth organization, one that is creating the next generation of leaders,” Cemi told his faculty advisor.

As organizer and MC of this event, Cemi has put together an exciting line-up of talented performers and local artists. Teens (and their adult friends and supporters) will be entertained by:
· Speakers: Luis Guzman, Liz Murray and author Ivan Sanchez
· Performances by: Cuculand from Yerba Buena, La Bruja, Kess (from the L.E.S), Krazy Race (From L.A), Mike Imperiale (From L.E.S) & Leon Heartman
· Comedy: Ruperto Vanderpool
· And dropping by to talk about art: Local fashion designer Victoria Keen, the one and only Lee Quinones, one of the originators of graffiti and New York Street Art

Admission to this event will be sliding scale for adults (tix sold at the door for $20 and up). Youth are being asked to bring a donation of canned or packaged food, which will be donated to the Middle Collegiate Church Food Pantry.

For more information about the Girls Club visit www.girlsclub.org.

ONE reason to go to a Barnes and Noble

Meanwhile, as Jeremiah has discussed, this is Independent Bookstore Week. As he wrote, "go visit an indie and buy their books -- before it's too late."

Yes! Plant saved from certain cruel (crueler?) fate at Kurve!

First, my apologies for the lousy photo. It was dark out when I passed Kurve on Second Avenue at Fifth Street last night. (Uh, being night, it would be dark!) And no way could I use the flash, and alert the 38 people working at the Starship Thaiper...and risk being pelted with foie gras torchon (with red currant jam) and spicy king salmon tartare....

Anyway! The plant has been saved! It has apparently been picked up!



Previously!



And previous to that previously!



Thank you to all of you who helped make the rescue a reality! Another Michelin Star for them!

Previously on EV Grieve:
Despite hard-hitting expose, plant at Kurve worse off than ever

200 block of Avenue A, after 8 p.m., Nov. 19

Walking on Avenue A between 12th Street and 14th Street last night around 8:15, noticed modest crowds at Drop-Off Service, Common Ground and Destination (below)...



...and at Superdive...

First signs of life at E2E4: Newspapers in the driveway!

As you can barely see in the top photo, no one is living yet in the 15-story tower of condo on the Bowery...



Regardless, future tenants (Moby? John Legend?) are already having their newspapers delivered to E2E4's gated driveway....




...or maybe this is just a way for newspapers to pad their sluggish circulation figures...



Previously.

Orange crush: Why Jude Law tossed his fruit at NYU frosh

Yesterday, I pointed out the piece from Washington Square News about Jude Law living right across the way of an NYU frosh dorm. Well! Today, the Post follows up on the article, noting:

In Shakespeare's day, audience members heckled actors by hurling rotten fruit. But a few weeks ago, when Law's yoga session was interrupted, the fruit flew in the opposite direction.

"He noticed we were there and we started waving at him. Then he went inside and came back with two oranges," freshman Neha Najeeb told The Post. "He threw them at our window, but he missed." Law then went back inside and returned with two additional oranges, she said.

"This time, he hit the windows -- there was orange pulp on the glass for a week -- and then he went back to working out," she said. "Now we don't like Jude Law anymore."

Vikings continued to make ancestors proud during pub crawl

Thanks to OthelloNYC for providing the above photo on Avenue A from last Saturday's Viking pub crawl in the neighborhood. As Othello wrote, "You forgot about chanting 'Flight of the Valkyries,' and ending up being in an outdoor police lineup, and fun times like this."

Indeed.

Previously on EV Grieve:
The viking age: "They were grabbing people off the sidewalk and pulling them into their revelry of yo-ho! and woo-hoo!"

Peeking inside the former Tribe space

Just the other day we were talking about what's going on with the former Tribe space on First Avenue at St. Mark's.

Back in March, The Villager's Patrick Hedlund reported that Danny Rivera, owner of the Crooked Tree around the corner on St. Mark's, will open a tapas bar in this space.

The old Tribe has seemingly been quiet...but apparently not. We caught a glimpse inside last night:



Previously on EV Grieve:
From Tribe to tapas at First Avenue and St. Mark's Place

Taco/boutique combo ready for action

When we first reported on the new La Lucha taco/boutique coming to Avenue A near Ninth Street, the joint was expected to be opening two weeks. Anyway, fast forward five months...La Lucha opens today...

Per UrbanDaddy:

And here, the ground rules of Mexico City are in effect—no guacamole, no sides of rice and beans, and a staunch anti-burrito position. Drop by at the start of a long night and you'll get a grilled tortilla doused with six different imported chilis, created by a guy who's eaten his way around the Mexican capital. Or specials like the Mil Máscaras: a trio of tortillas piled with cecina steak, Oaxaca cheese and enough bacon to make sure you're ready for the various tequila menus of the East Village.

Meanwhile, a few doors to the north, you'll find San Loco. The battle lines are drawn.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Coming soon to Avenue A: "Best taco shop and boutique in NY!"

A little something for all you font lovers in the house

The Society for Environmental Graphic Design published a blog post on Cooper Union alum Abbott Miller, who was tapped to design the signage on the school's new academic building. He chose something from the Foundry Gridnik type family (you know, the thinking man's Courier).

Miller used dimensional type to engage and activate multiple planes and architectural surfaces. The building identity, for example, is optically extruded letterforms that appear "correct" when seen in strict elevation, but distort as the profile of the letter is dragged backwards in space. The top half of the letters, appearing on one plane of the canopy, are dimensional, while the bottom half are cut out of another plane, echoing the transparency of the building's skin of perforated stainless steel.

Exactly what I was thinking.

What a view!

An ad for the Top of the Rock Observation Deck on 12th Street and Avenue B...

Impressions of the new Bowery

[Image via Metropolis by Adam Friedberg]

SVA faculty member Karrie Jacobs checks in with a Bowery reborn piece in the November issue of Metropolis magazine....

Let's get to it:

What’s happened on the Bowery is surely gentrification, although the distance from five-buck flops to $500-a-night luxury suites cries out for a stronger term. I see something else: a lesson in urban ecology. The places where it’s possible for new architecture to thrive in Manhattan are generally those districts where the political clout of civic groups is the weakest. In Greenwich Village or on the Upper East Side, the community boards and neighborhood activists rush in like SWAT teams to counter development threats. But on the former skid row, the power to say no to development isn’t as strong. A preservation-oriented downzoning of the East Village, approved late last year, left out the Bowery. Development on the west side of the street is moderated by the low-density zoning of the Noho Historic District and the Little Italy Special District. The east side of the Bowery, where most new development has taken place, was left undefended. While an organization called the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors has tried to have rules put in place to limit buildings on the east side of the Bowery to eight stories, that strip is still approved for what the city’s Zoning Handbook calls “high bulk.”

And!

One time, shortly after the completion of the massive apartment complexes that now face the Bowery on the north and south sides of Houston Street, I emerged from a nearby subway station — something I’d done literally hundreds of times — and had no idea where I was. The new buildings, the hopelessly bland Avalon Bowery Place and Avalon Chrystie Place, developed by a large real estate investment trust, had wiped out my sense of place.

By contrast, the architect Carlos Zapata’s Cooper Square Hotel has emerged as a landmark. But not all landmarks are created equal. The glassy 21-story tower, which borrows its milk-colored glass and swoopy style from Frank Gehry’s much nicer IAC headquarters on the West Side, is wedged so tightly between the neighboring tenements that it appears to be a cartoon illustrating the evils of overdevelopment. I attended a party in the hotel’s penthouse that was a total mob scene, but on the afternoon of a recent walking tour, I found the public spaces ghostly and depopulated. I’ve heard that its East Village neighbors have coined a nickname for the Cooper Square: “Dubai.” And as I sat by myself in the back patio, the building prompted the exact question I found myself asking all the time in Dubai: Who is this place for?

Who is this place for? I've been thinking the same thing for far too long...

One reason, perhaps, why Jude Law moved in next to a freshmen dorm at NYU

From Washington Square News:

On a recent night, a group of freshmen girls (and several boys) on the ninth floor of Hayden residence hall fought each other for a spot at the window in a dorm room. They all pressed their faces against the glass, straining to catch a glimpse of someone a few floors below in the building behind Hayden.

The word was spreading — Jude Law had officially moved in next door.

"We didn't even know he lived here," Tisch freshman Erica Rose said. (Her room is where the students gather to spy.) "I just came home one day and the entire floor was in my room staring out the window," Rose said.

And!

LSP freshman Bryan Hall said he feels bad for Law.

He said: "He moved in next to a freshmen dorm, so he'll always be ogled by freshmen girls."

Related:
On the Market: Jude Law's Sinful Village Hideaway (Curbed)


Photo via Priya Vij

Copper Building getting a handle on things

New development: Handles on the balcony doors! Now we're looking forward to seeing the rest of the balcony.

Well, not really. We actually like the balconies just the way they are. Will make those outdoor cookouts all the more challenging. Will be fun to watch from a perch at Mona's.

Previously.

"Live the uber-bohemian lifestyle"

I've just become aware of a Web site called Cribs of the Crop. Per their bio: "We are a group of real estate investors with apartments for sale throughout NYC. Everything you see on this site is an apartment that we own and are selling directly — we are not brokers."

Here's a description for a studio for sale on East 14th Street:

Live the uber-bohemian lifestyle in this swanky lil' East Village pad. Unit features exposed brick, tasteful interior design (thanks, tenant!), and an ENORMOUS, beautiful, bucolic tree (outside the window, of course). There's also an entirely separate eat-in kitchen (how many studios have that?!), a walk-in closet (or that!?) and this really old, really cool looking woodsy-like floor material that was probably carried over from the old country on some poor shlub's back. Oh, and the apartment is on the third floor in a walk-up building, which is an ASSET: keep your body up to the standard of all the slinky lil' hipsters in the nabe by running up and down the stairs. Old-world wood flooring, new-world body-molding...an ideal combination of the contemporary and yesteryear.

Sort of makes UrbanDaddy sound like The Economist.

No need to thank me

From the EV Grieve inbox:

Hello E.V.,

As a travel blogger, we would like to introduce you and your readers to one of the newest and most artistically robust hotels to debut in NYC in recent years, The Surrey. The hotel debuted on November 12 in Manhattan's most exclusive neighborhood, the Upper East Side, and it premiered with an extensive art collection — including works by Jenny Holzer, Jimmie Martin, Richard Serra, Donald Sultan and William Kentridge — and 3-star, in-room dining by Cafe Boulud.

Built in Beaux-Arts architectural design, The Surrey has just concluded a $60+ million dollar re-creation by renowned architectural and interior designer Lauren Rottet, FAIA, IIDA. Beaux-Arts/Art Deco custom-designed furnishings and fixtures fill the walls of this 1900s structure with pieces such as hand-painted armoires and ornate walnut cabinetry. Sprinkled throughout the 17 floors, guests also encounter captivating black & white photos of New York and unexpected graffitied pieces.

The Surrey features 190 salons, including 30 suites, a Penthouse and a Presidential suite, that range from 350 to 4,500 square feet. At the heart of all salons and suites is the handcrafted DUX bed by Duxiana, engineered for perfect support, and dressed in Sferra bedding.

As an introductory package for your readers at EV Greive, we would like to offer a special Intro Package that includes a complimentary room upgrade, a welcome gift, breakfast for two, and much more. For more information please visit http://www.thesurrey.com/Introductory.