Beloved by vaguely health-conscious girls from coast to coast, Pirates Booty has become a hang-over staple, a white cheddar puffed delicacy ever preferable to radioactive orange Cheetos. The East Village is about to get its own fresh batch of Booty, as the brand's founder, Robert Ehrlich has just bought a home in the neighborhood, city records show. Read More
Andre Balazs is not known for his quietude, having developed hotels the world over famous for their parties and celebrities—the Standard Hollywood has naked people in the lobby, the Standard Manhattan has them the windows. So it is surprising to hear the hot hotelier tell Grub Street that the new Standard East Village, inside the old, alien-looking Cooper Square Hotel, will be more "residential, more quiet—more introspective, if you will." Read More
Jimmy McMillan isn't done with us yet. The man, the legend who electrified the political scene briefly in 2010 with his amazing debate performances and unnaturally epic facial hair is suing the NY State Board of Elections for leaving the word "damn" out of the name of his party, "The Rent Is 2 DAMN High Party." In a complaint filed earlier this week McMillan said NY State Board of Elections officials have a "'BIAS' against the word DAMN in the Rent Is 2 DAMN High Party name." Read More
Last night, The Observer happened to be strolling around the East Village. From the free-range organic leather goods to trendy speakeasy boites, the East Village retail has visibly gentrified. But what about the residential side? With more tenements than townhouses, the East Village may never draw the moneyed marked enjoyed by the Read More
As you enter the capacious quarters of the Public Theater in the East Village, you walk through a construction site: a grand building being torn out from the inside. The space is currently undergoing renovations, but still acts as the primary location for the eighth year of Under the Radar, New York’s downtown experimental theater festival, which runs through Jan. 15.
This feeling of restoration never seems to leave as you become privy to the rich, eclectic and fiercely original performances the two weeks has to offer. Experimental theater, by definition, avoids convention, often leaving audiences questioning the value of the genre. But doubters must make the trip downtown: the offerings are impressive and remarkably diverse, including media like video, music, dance and puppetry, produced by companies based in Europe and America. Read More
However hard to imagine, the East Village will soon be even more colorful. A local group has managed to raise a full $3,000 on Kickstarter to "beautify" the East Village, DNAinfo reports. Apparently deeming itself too urbane for scaffolding and dumpsters, those city scabs we've come to know and love, the Fourth Arts Block (FAB, get it?!) will use the money to paint the industrial construction accoutrements.
The group has been quietly embellishing construction sites in the neighborhood since 2008. Perhaps best known for the sidewalk mural on Extra Place, the non-profit organization hopes both to make the neighborhood more aesthetically agreeable and to evoke the neighborhood's gritty, guerilla-art past. Read More
A six-story, 25-unit East Village walk-up with mostly market-rate units has sold for $8.7 million, Eastern Consolidated brokers said yesterday.
RURU & Associates, a family investor, nabbed 68-70 Second Avenue, also known as 86 East 4th Street, after standing out among an estimated 100 other potential buyers.
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For the last two years, the Holiday Cocktail Lounge, hailed by some to be New York's grimiest, sloppiest and most dastardly dive bar -- i.e. New York's best dive bar -- has soldiered forward with its captain, Stefan Lutek, gone. He died at the age of 89 after decades of tending bar at the joint, Read More
IHOP is usually where you go during those trips back home after you've gotten drunk with friends, hooked up with that girl you went to high school with, and then puked out your dinner at 3 a.m. in mom's parking lot. Anyone up for pancakes??
So yes, it's a little unnerving to see not one, but two IHOP opening up in the Brooklyn/Manhattan area: it's like finding out you can now order Moon Over My Hammy at The Spotted Pig. Well, not quite that bad, but...
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Talk about a bad trip! In Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny, the new memoir from Nile Rodgers out this October, there's a acid-addled anecdote involving a certain downtown art superstar, a story that's perhaps never seen the light of day. It involves a party in Little Italy gone Read More
Neighborhoods in New York have always been fungible. Names change or are invented out of thin air, acronyms, and nearby landmarks. Borders shift like tectonic plates—slowly, imperceptibly, then, in a city-shaking tremor, all at once. We all pretend to hate it, but we live with it, quietly profiting off it all. This is a town singularly obsessed with real estate, after all. So who can really blame Rose Associates for pushing the boundaries of the East Village? Read More
Video
Can you feel it? The wave of schadenfreude rippling through the dowdy real estate brokerages and glass-faced, wood-paneled developers' suites of the city? Look no further than the comments on industry organ The Real Deal. The news that Jimmy McMillan might be evicted from a rent-controlled apartment in the East Village has shocked and delighted the real estate community. His landlord has taken him to court, but the evidence against him is littered across the Internet. Read More
"Everybody seemed to be targeting the East Village and West Village, but they're finding prices are better here," said the Douglas Elliman broker for 226 East 12th Street, apartment 4H, a prewar co-op on a tree-lined street. The one-bedroom apartment is going for $495,000 and was one of the hits of the day—it has a spacious living room and a kitchen big enough to move around in, which is more than we could say for some of the cheaper units we stopped by.
This week for Your Open House we took a look at one-bedrooms in the East Village, and most people we talked to noted that they were drawn to the tree-lined streets and vast entertainment options of the downtown villages, but wanted something less pricey than the west one. Read More
Thus far into 2011, Aziz Ansari has not been shy about imposing his presence on New York City. He stuck by his buddy James Murphy's side as he closed the curtain on his band, LCD Soundsystem. He chilled with half-naked dudes next to GQ editor Jim Nelson at The Ace Hotel. And we Read More
