Lower East Side

Borough President Scott Stringer has endorsed the city's proposed rezoning of the Lower East Side, giving a boost to a plan that would allow for more residential development while adding restrictions to other types, including dorms.

His endorsement of the plan, issued today, comes as the City Planning Commission gears up for a mega-hearing Wednesday, with throngs of community members expected to deliver testimony on proposed rezonings of the Lower East Side, the planned middle income-intensive Hunters Point South development near Long Island City, and the proposed redevelopment of Willets Point by Shea Stadium.

The Lower East Side rezoning cuts back on a density bonus given to "community facilities," which include dorms and buildings with medical offices and other uses, while allowing developers in parts of the neighborhood to build bigger if they include below-market rate housing.  read more »

On Tuesday, in the waning daylight, a small line formed outside Webster Hall in the East Village. The crowd, as likely to sport zebra-striped jeans and Mohawks as flannel shirts and grizzled beards, had come for a special screening of Captured--a film that examines the life and work of Canadian street photographer and artist Clayton Patterson as he followed the Lower East Side's transition from junkie-town to condo-city--to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Tompkins Square Park Police Riot.

Inside, Machine and Alden Pact, members of rap group Team Facelift, bought drinks at the bar with Captured's art director Paul Lawrence and fellow former Mass Appeal mag writer PrettyLew. The scent of marijuana wafted across the theatre, as two hundred fifty people searched for a seat among the folded plastic chairs.

"In my day I seen some acrobatic junkies," read John Joseph from Evolution of the Cro-Magnon Man, a book he wrote about his days as a homeless kid in the LES. He rambled on about imagined marketing meetings where executives brainstormed different dope names and reminisced about a dealer named "Cool Man" who sold drugs from an ice cream truck parked near Tompkins Square Park.  read more »

Folk singer David Peel was leading a crowd of protesters in a singalong of his charming ditty “Die Yuppie Scum” on Friday evening, when suddenly the rebellious crooner experienced a moment of clarity.

“What are we doing over here?” Mr. Peel asked. “Where are the apartments?”

A few doors down, it turned out.

Demonstrators had intended to gather outside an apartment building at 47 East 3rd Street, owned by controversial landlord Alistair Economakis, who has been trying to uproot its rent-stabilized tenants for years in order to create a sprawling manse for himself and his family.  read more »

The aggrieved rent-stabilized tenants of 47 East 3rd Street are not giving up their fight against landlord Alistair Economakis, whose efforts since 2003 to convert his East Village building into a grand mansion for his family continue to be stymied by nine pesky renters who won't budge.

Earlier this month, in the third appeal since Mr. Economakis first began mass eviction proceedings five-a-half-years ago, the state's highest court sent the case back to housing court and a final verdict could be two years away. Under the owner occupancy clause of the rent law, the Economakis family still needs to prove to the court that they really plan to convert their 60-room, 11,575-square-foot East Village tenement into a single-family residence--tenants fear that their real agenda is to charge market-rate rents.  read more »

In a signed editorial by Francis X. Clines in today's New York Times, we learn that gentrification is changing the Lower East Side. While Mr. Clines concedes that this is an old story—"Hasn’t that been the case ever since this sliver of Manhattan was laid bare more than a century ago as the crammed tenement haven for immigrants?" he asks—he does seem to feel that the changes in the neighborhood are once again a pressing crisis:

As gentrification rushes in, the neighborhood is fortunate to have the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, so tourists can still walk through the way things were. A preservationist urge is also evident on the streets — from demands for tighter zoning to an “egg rolls and egg creams” block party this Sunday by The Museum at Eldridge Street.

As coincidence would have it, the blog EV Grieve recently posted a scan of Craig Unger's May 28, 1984 New York Magazine cover story "The Lower East Side: There Goes the Neighborhood." (This comes via Gothamist.)  read more »

For those of you who have always wanted to go see the Coney Island Circus Side Show or the Mermaid Parade but are too lazy to trek out to Brooklyn, tonight is your night.

The amusment park's motley crew of underbelly performance artists is coming to the Lower East Side from 7 to 11 p.m. for Coney Island USA’s annual Spring Gala at the Angel Orensanz Foundation. Lady Luck and the Suicide Kings are performing, and the Brooklyn Bombshells will kick off the night with swing dance lessons.  read more »

At 6 tonight, the Coalition to Protect Chinatown and the Lower East Side plans to rally against what now appears to be the inevitable rezoning of the East Village just to the north.

The group has labeled the rezoning a "racist" plan to limit building heights and essentially abolish the community benefits incentive in 110 blocks of the East Village and Lower East Side. Last week, the Department of City Planning certified the proposal, giving Community Board 3 60 days to review it before it goes to the borough president and the City Council. The Coalition wants to send the rezoning plan back to the drawing board to include the area south of Delancey Street and East of Avenue D.  read more »

The Department of City Planning is forging ahead with its plan to rezone 114 blocks of the East Village and the Lower East Side to limit the height and density of future development, despite allegations of racism from community groups in the Bowery and Chinatown, which were not included in the rezoning.  read more »

"This is a venue with a lot of history," said Tom Morello, the Harlem-born guitarist for political rock-rap group Rage Against The Machine, standing onstage at 315 Bowery early Friday morning. He was referring to CBGB, the legendary rock club that used to occupy that address.

"We can take it higher than it's ever been before," said Mr. Morello, who was joined onstage by a number of big-name musicians, including Jerry Cantrell, Perry Farrell and an openly smoking-ban-flouting Slash, in celebrating the grand reopening of the hallowed music hall. Concerts like these will happen only occassionally now, however, as the venue has become a high-end rock-themed clothing boutique.

"We're gonna jump the fuck up and down," Mr. Morello told the packed crowd, many of whom had shelled out $75 per ticket to attend the charity concert, which also included performances by Ronnie Spector, Ian Hunter and Joan Jett. "I wanna see everybody jump," he said, including "the guy selling $300 T-shirts."

That guy was John Varvatos, the fashion designer who now operates the former CBGB space.  read more »

Demonstrators who picketed the new John Varvatos boutique on the Bowery last week plan a second wave of protests tonight, as the fashion designer celebrates the store's grand opening with a splashy charity concert.

The shop is located on the site of the former legendary rock club CBGB, which shuttered in 2006 after a lengthly rent dispute with its landlord.

"We'll have more humorous (and pointed) neon pink signs..." e-mailed activist Rebecca Moore, who last week carried a placard reading "ONE 'SMALL' LOSS OF A MUSIC SPACE, ONE LARGE STEP FOR PANTS."

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What used to be a Lower East Side destination has become a no-man’s land of rats, dirty streets and prolonged high-rise construction projects.

“People look down here and see a ghost town,” said a man who works on the block of Orchard Street just south of Houston. “And they just keep walking.”

The block had been a quintessential part of the reincarnated neighborhood. Its designer fashion boutiques, old-world fabric store, discount retailers, bars and restaurants reflected the gentrifying of the neighborhood at a tolerable pace. On Sundays, the street closed to cars to create a pedestrian mall, with many of the stores setting up displays in the middle of the street. In the summer, the block hosted the occasional food festival or local band.

But much of the sound on the block the past three years has been the noise from the construction of Jason Pomeranc’s 19-story boutique hotel at 200 Allen Street (the back of which sits on the west side of Orchard); and of developer Morris Platt’s 26-story condominium almost directly across from the hotel on the west side at 180 Orchard Street. More than three years ago, both developers bought up several one-story commercial buildings and razed those to make way for their projects.  read more »

I wrote in today's Observer about the drops in doorman-building rents. The stats for that story came from a new February market report by The Real Estate Group New York.

Some of the other stats in the report show a marked increase in Lower East Side rents. For instance, the average monthly rent in a two-bedroom in a non-doorman building increased 3.3 percent from March of last year to $3,273.  read more »

Dear Lower East Side: The 1990s called and said they want their favorite band back. Yes, R.E.M., the iconic Athens four-piece (turned three-piece) that sort of went out of style around the same time as 120 Minutes and Alternative Nation was apparently all over Rivington Street earlier this week shooting a video for the first single off their soon-to-be-released, 14th album (and possible comeback?), Accelerate, which comes out April 1 on Warner Bros., Brooklyn Vegan reports. The know-all indie blog picked up the news via the L.E.S. sex shop Babeland, which, much to the employees’ excitement, was one of the locations scouted for the shoot. R.E.M. is also slated to play this year’s SXSW festival in Austin.

I decided to do a little recreational house-hunting on Sunday afternoon to see if the Manhattan housing market is really as resilient as it's cracked up to be.

My experience hunting for a rental apartment downtown in August had been thoroughly depressing—I did not see a single inhabitable apartment for under $3,000 a month and even then, the choice was between living in a shoebox or in a grungy, amenity-free condo. After reading all the 2007 year-end market reports released by the brokerage firms during the past few weeks, I braced myself for the house-hunting malaise familiar to most New Yorkers. But it never came.  read more »

Klaus Nomi, the influential New Wave opera singer, semi-alien, and early ‘80s Lower East Side performance icon, was one of the first gay artists to succumb to AIDS when he died in 1983, as documented in Andrew Horn’s tear-inducing, yet hilariously quirky, 2004 film The Nomi Song. Though Nomi’s career was short-lived, and his synth-infused opera music -- for lack of a better word -- bizarre, the eccentric, German-born singer’s influence was considerable, touching pop stars (Morrissey) and contemporary composers (Austria’s Olga Neuwirth) alike. Now, on the eve of what would have been Mr. Nomi’s (nee Klaus Sperber) 64th birthday on January 24, a portion of his unfinished opera, Za Bakdaz, or “Nomi Homeland,” has for the first time been made available on CD.   read more »

You can still visit American Apparel’s much-hyped digital outpost in Second Life, the user-generated virtual Internet world, but the store has been chained shut since last summer when the hipster clothing chain announced it would close its doors on “Lerappa Island for now."

Was the company's departure triggered by a virtual terrorist attack? (a group called the Second Life Liberation Army gunned down virtual shoppers at American Apparel to protest the commercialization of the site).  read more »

If all the neighborhoods below 100th Street in Manhattan competed for an annual prize of best rental market (from the landlords' perspective), the 2007 winner would clearly be the Lower East Side. There, a spate of luxury residential development drove the average rent of a studio apartment in a doorman building up 32.8 percent to a peak of $3,034 in the fall, according to a report from brokerage The Real Estate Group New York.

Rents in all doorman apartments increased by at least 10 percent on the Lower East Side, but there are still bargains.  read more »

The Lower East Side building housing Streit's matzo factory has been put on the sales market, Curbed reports. The building, at 148-154 Rivington Street, has been the home of Streit's since 1925; Massey Knakal's marketing it, and it can be torn down or converted into another use. Streit's itself is moving, though it's not clear where.

A Yankees bar packed with Red Sox fans?

It's Rudy Giuliani's new campaign headquarters!

Or it could be. With 72 screens crammed into such a narrow tavern, Blue Seats feels like a military command center, albeit one serving truffle-oiled mac 'n cheese for $16 a plate.

The inescapable and overwhelming TV exposure recalls that re-conditioning scene in Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange--only, combined with massive quantities of beer, it seems to have the opposite effect.

On Wednesday night, a trio of rowdy fratty dudes got into a bitchy scuffle, knocking into patrons at the bar and disasterously causing one reporter to spill his beer.

What's that they say in Boston? "Cowboy up!"

NYPD continues its crackdown on seedy retailers on the Lower East Side.

The Post reports that a purported ping-pong parlor, the so-called Robo-Pong Training Center, located at 39 Eldridge Street, was actually just a "front for a whorehouse," whose target market apparently consisted of horndog teenagers from nearby Pace High School.

A really cheap whorehouse, it turns out -- with prices ranging from just $35 to $60 a pop.

"It was obvious that they were targeting young students, because the prices were so low," said one disgusted police official, adding, "Most brothels charge at least $100."

Given the cut rates, we wonder: How did Robo-Pong ever manage to cover its rent?

Volume?

Finally, there is a bar for “the banker that goes to work with his guitar strapped to his back.”

That gem is from a press release The Observer received this morning announcing the opening of The Randolph at Broome, a new bar set for 354 Broome Street.

According to the release, a motley assortment of friends--including a hedge fund manager, a bartender, a jazz musician and a real estate contractor--came up with the idea after tiring of the “B&T packed super club.” The site for their new venture is the former M Bar.

The bar will apparently have a “West Indies speakeasy” feel, and whether you like it or not, chances are you will be sauced by the time you head out to catch that cab back to the Upper East Side. The Randolph features a signature drink that sounds like it was made up during Sigma Chi’s Rush Week. The beverage, called the “Michael Derry” consists of “lemon concentrate, imported beer and vodka.” Awesome.

The full release is after the jump.  read more »

In July, The Observer reported the impending (or so we were told) opening of Blue Seats, the Lower East Side’s first bonafide sports bar. The 2,000-square-foot bar, named after the famous seats in Madison Square Garden where loyal fans sit, was set to open on July 30 at 157 Ludlow Street.

Its goal, once it opens, is to appease every mold of sports fan—from those who prefer high-definition flat-screen TVs and Philly cheese steaks to those who like blueberry mojitos and raw oysters. (The early shots of the interior reveal a sort of Sex and the City meets Cheers milieu, so the bar might just assuage all comers.)

However, July 30 has come and gone, and Blue Seats’ doors remain closed. The delay quickly became the fodder of various restaurant blogs. A variety of reasons were given for the hold-up from broken televisions to incomplete construction. Eater.com even went so far as to create a delay timeline.

So, to get to the bottom of the situation, we called up Gabrielle Bernstein, Blue Seats’ PR rep.  read more »

The most prominent feature of Rayuela, the soon-to-open "freestyle Latino" eatery at 165 Allen Street, is the two-story olive tree that sits in the middle of the restaurant. Like most else in the establishment, the tree was imported.

"I spent three days without sleep looking for this tree in California," co-owner Hector Sanz told The Observer. "It is a menzanillo, a rare type of olive tree."

Rayuela, which means "hopscotch" in Spanish, will open next Friday and join a host of other modern Latin restaurants (Mercadito, Centrico) that have sprouted up downtown over the last few years. However, Mr. Sanz makes it clear that it will be different from its predecessors.  read more »