To honor the positive impact of local businesses on Animal Welfare, “Shop Cats of New York” author Tamar Arslanian has teamed up with vegan boutique MooShoes, 78 Orchard St. between Broome and Grand, to host a happy hour with vegan drinks and snacks tonight from 6:30-8:30. In the spirit of the evening 10 percent of all sales during the event, along with $10 from the sale of each book will benefit the local charity Positive Tails Inc.
“Shop Cats of New York,” published by HarperCollins, highlights over 30 New York City small businesses that, in addition to helping the local economy, have opened their doors to create loving homes for cats that might not otherwise have one. Sisters and Queen natives Erica and Sara Kubersk founded MooShoes, one the shops featured in the book, where they have a long history providing permanent homes to felines while also fostering animals in need. Current resident felines Marlow and Georgie will be guests of honor during the celebration.
Tenants believe the time has come to make Mr. Toledano feel less comfortable at his home since, according to tenants, he has seen fit to do the same to them. Tenants report that Mr. Toledano has on at least two occasions refused to meet face to face with them and elected officials to discuss issues of importance to tenants, and so tenants say they are voicing their concerns directly to Mr. Toledano at his home.
[Saturday's] protesters assert that Mr Toledano has not met his obligations as a responsible landlord, forcing tenants to live in vermin-infested buildings without cooking gas and creating construction chaos as he haltingly renovates buildings.
[Toledano] said he was in contract with an investor to buy a $200 million portfolio of properties in the West Village, a neighborhood where he said tenants were less organized.
I kind of want to get out of the East Village walk-up business, to be honest," he said, without a hint of remorse. "There is so much scrutiny of the buyouts."
The last time you had a yen for Indian cuisine, Sushil Malhotra probably satisfied your craving, albeit indirectly. Have you ever had a fantastic meal at Chutney Masala in Irvington or taken clients to dinner at Dawat in Manhattan? Maybe you’ve picked up lunch at the Café Spice booth in Grand Central’s Dining Concourse. And if you frequent Whole Foods Market, you may have savored the Indian food from its hot bar.
You can thank Malhotra for all of those culinary delights. The Irvington resident also can be given major credit for bringing upscale Indian food to the United States. In fact, the food from Malhotra’s empire, Café Spice, is now so popular that he can hardly keep up with the demand.
The most purely Tuscan pasta is a broad noodle here called by its generic name of maccheroni in a chunky wild-boar sauce. All are quite fantastic...
The décor at this restaurant might be termed East Village rustic, including the usual rickety tables, tin ceilings, and crumbling walls, forming the local equivalent, I suppose, of a rural osteria in the Tuscan countryside. Posters of canned food products dating from the 60s adorn the walls, perhaps the work of some Italian Andy Warhol. In the back corner is a pasta-making machine, and one of the cooks frequently steps out of the kitchen to tend it, making pastas that, if not all Tuscan, are uniformly delicious.
Name: This longtime resident wanted to share his story but asked to remain anonymous
Occupation: Retired
Location: St. Mark's Place between First Avenue and Avenue A
Date: Monday, May 1 at 3:45 p.m.
I’m from Europe. I immigrated here from Greece when I was 5. I came to the Lower East Side, about less than a mile from here. There were a lot of Greek immigrants at that time. It was OK – a lot of people in the neighborhood knew each other, and there was a big Greek community up until about the 1970s. A lot of the old timers started dying and moving out and Chinatown started expanding. There are only a handful of families left now. I’ve lived on the Lower East Side my whole life.
My father had a merchandize business on the Lower East Side, selling housewares, glasswares, cookware. A friend of mine knew the super of a building. He controlled who was going in and out, so I spoke to him and he said, ‘I can keep an apartment aside for you.’ They were much more available then.I started out at $225 a month – it was more than amazing.
I moved in around 1979. I was just glad for a place to stay that I could afford. I lucked out and soon after I moved in, the super friend of mine, I told him, ‘I think I’m thinking of moving out,’ and he said, ‘You know what? Don’t you dare move out. The rents are going to be much higher and you’re going to regret it.’ So I figured, let me listen to the voice of experience, because somehow he had an inkling of what was to happen, and it turned out exactly right. I’m glad I listened to him. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be around here.
When I was in my 20s, and my father’s business was still open, friends from the neighborhood used to go to a place called Adam and Eve. It was on Waverly Place, right near NYU — a big hangout place for students and people in that age group. We used to go there and just drink pitchers of beer and get smashed there, but the difference was that we weren’t out to cause any trouble or be annoying or anything. We used to just sort of hang around with each other. We didn’t get involved with anybody else there.
After I closed my father’s business, I went to work in Century 21 in Brooklyn, and later in the wholesale jewelry business in Chinatown. I stayed there quite some time, 18 years, and then around 2001, the business started going down so I got laid off and I went to work in Midtown in the big jewelry district on 47th Street. I went to work for another wholesale place but much bigger, much busier. The boss and the manager realized right away that I had more experience than most of the people working in there. He grabbed me right away. It’s hard to find somebody to do that kind of work. They had a big mail-order all over the country. Crazy boss, very strict, very paranoid and stuff but I learned how to deal with it.
There were a whole bunch of drug dealers right on that corner where the bar Good Night Sonny is. It used to be a cleaners and they used to congregate and sell that stuff on the corner. They put the guy right out of business because his customers were too afraid to drop stuff off and pick stuff up. I would avoid that side of the street – it was horrible. When Giuliani became mayor, he started cleaning up a lot of the street traffic – one of the few good things that he did. That improved the situation a lot. Didn’t solve it because they just packed up and moved to another neighborhood.
The neighborhood was like the Haight-Ashbury of the 1960s in a way. The East Village became like that and is still like that to an extent. Everything goes, total freedom, and a mixture of people. A lot of freedom just in the sense that you could be whatever you wanted and nobody would look down on you.
A lot of the old-timers have died or moved out or whatever and the yuppies started moving in. You can’t blame them for doing it, but since they’re willing to pay more ... the landlords just took advantage of it and started charging higher rents.
I would prefer it if the rents weren’t up so high but there’s nothing I can do about that. It’s unfair — it’s pushing out the working-class people and the poor people, and the students come in and they’re not thinking of long term. They just stay a year or two until they finish school. Landlords love that because then you can increase the rent by law, so the rents just keep on going up. It’s going to reach another housing bubble I think. I see a lot more signs around, apartments for rent, than I saw the year before.
The high rents have also been pushing out small business. It’s been very hard for any little business to survive. Along this block there’s a high turnover, especially further down. Some of the stores don’t even last a year, and then they’ve got to get out. That’s a horrible situation, because it can’t be that they’re all doing something wrong. It’s just that they can’t make enough. Nobody wants to work for the landlord.
Though intended to protect passers-by from falling debris, these eyesores known as sidewalk sheds have often become a blight, drawing a barrage of complaints from residents and businesses that they block light and views, attract crime and litter and impede foot traffic along congested sidewalks.
It has taken stock of scaffolding and created an online system to better track the structures at a time when there are more of them than ever as older buildings need work and a construction boom produces more towers. In a sweep last year, building inspectors checked every piece of scaffolding and while most needed to remain for safety, about 150 were ordered dismantled because work had been finished.
The new map marks every building with scaffolding with a color-coded dot showing why the structures went up: red for buildings deemed unsafe, light blue for repairs, dark blue for new construction and green for maintenance work. Clicking on a dot reveals more details, including the date a permit was first approved. The older the scaffolding, the larger the dot.
Taking it to the Streets!
The Art + Design of Posters and Flyers on the Lower East Side in the 80s + 90s
Before Twitter and Facebook people had to use the streets to organize, their messages wheatpaste postered right on a pole. It was the era of 'xeroxcracy' and the streets were the gallery walls. These political posters and fliers raised awareness and helped organize community for grassroots political change. The posters range in subject from defending the squats and community gardens, taking on gentrification and the rich, police brutality, gender equality, environmentalism and anti-nuclear war activism. The floors of the museum will be stenciled to resemble the sidewalks of the past.
OPENING: Thursday, May 4 at 7-9 p.m.
HOURS: Tuesday, Thursday-Sunday 12-7 p.m.
Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space
155 Avenue C, between Ninth Street and 10th Street
Show runs until Thursday, June 29
I know you've recently been covering a string of thefts around the area. Not sure if this fits the MO but a friend was robbed in my building as he was leaving my apartment. I live on the ground floor and the perp ran down the stairs to hold up my friend for his backpack ... meaning the perp was let into the building somehow.
[P]eople should not let anyone in unless they are expecting someone. My apartment has been buzzed a lot recently by people we weren't expecting — likely trying to get in the building for a variety of reasons.
