A Hidden Lower East Side

      Wednesday afternoon, a childhood friend of mine –– whose family has been at their apartment on East Broadway since 1956 –– got in touch with me about what sounded like people clearing out the buildings next to his at 237 and 235 East Broadway (Sharis Adath Israel and the former home of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis respectively). When I arrived on the scene that same afternoon, the doors to 235 East Broadway were being shut and two Junklugger trucks were just pulling away from the curb, stacked with what looked like large amounts of furniture. East Broadway was littered with papers that had blown off the back of these trucks, and as I started to pick them up I saw that many of these documents represented records of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, correspondence in Hebrew and Yiddish, newspaper clippings, pages from religious books, all of which dating back decades. I called Junkluggers and asked if they would be able to intercept any of these documents before they...

      Three days ago, it was announced  that K Property Group and East End Capital, the developers who purchased Sunshine Cinema for $31.5 million, had received a $67-million construction loan from Capital Source, as well as an additional $19-million loan from Canyon Partners for the new mezzanine. This news indicates the imminent demolition of the 19th century building as plans for a 68,000 square-foot luxury commercial space on the site move forward.       (my original post on Sunshine can be found here )

      Two mornings ago, EV Grieve broke the news  that the Hells Angels appeared to have vacated their clubhouse on Third after 50 years –– all identifying marks had been removed or painted over, leaving only the "77" across the now completely black entryway. The group's sudden departure from a block and neighborhood it had called home since the late 60's has been met with a genuine mixed array of emotions and reactions. As the EV Grieve's article was shared across various Lower East Side pages on Facebook yesterday, numbers of people mourned this move as another symbol of the erasure of the neighborhood's culture, or the further capitulation to real-estate developers, while numbers of others implored commenters to explain why we should lament the loss of an organization with such a violent criminal past. A similar dynamic often arises within conversations around the Lower East Side's long and extensive history of gang activity, drug use, prostituti...

(The East River Park Amphitheater, built in 1941, which will be destroyed when the city moves forward with its new "Preferred Alternative Plan" for the ESCR)       With little fanfare this past Thursday, March 14th, the De Blasio administration announced that they would be pursuing new plans for the East River Park and Lower Manhattan shoreline; not only presenting additional designs for extending Lower Manhattan up to two blocks into the river, but implementing a new phased-construction plan for the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project (known as ESCR). In September, the city revealed that they would be abandoning previous designs for the ESCR, in favor of a new plan which "involves completely destroying East River park, 'elevating' it with 8 feet of landfill, and rebuilding a new park on top." That disastrous proposal was met with a predictably disastrous response from local residents, politicians, and community advocacy groups. Organized in the w...

      At the end of this past February, Community Board 3 put their support behind the Cooper Square Committee Land Trust as a part of their broader motion to halt the planned $50,000,000 sale of the Church of the Nativity on Second Ave: " Community Board 3 urges the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, as well as other religious institutions, to declare a moratorium on the disposition of any Catholic Church or other religiously-owned and decommissioned properties for one year from the date the proposed Town Hall meeting is held to discuss alternative scenarios formulated by the broader community. " The full text of this motion can be read here , where CB3 lists seven primary reasons which should compel the Archdiocese to heed their call; from the Pope's general call for increased community participation, to the urgent need for affordable/senior housing in the neighborhood, and generally combat the implications of displacement on low-income families, the homeless,...

          If you end up down on Madison and Saint James, near the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, you've stepped into the area of the Lower East Side formerly known as the Fourth Ward. With Five Points just to its west, the Fourth Ward composed part of the East River shoreline and is generally folded in with the old Corlear's Hook neighborhood (also known as the "Hook", where once almost one hundred brothels were located and the term "hooker" was coined). This area of Lower Manhattan, around the time of Robert "Roxie" Vanella's birth in 1883, was largely occupied by ship-builders, dockyards, and the assorted tenement. The triangular block that Vanella's Funeral Chapel sits on also houses the former St. James School, noted as the only site of Alfred E. Smith's formal education (who was only ten years Vanella's senior), and neighbors the St. James Church, the second oldest Roman Catholic building in NYC and the home of the Ancien...

           It’s Ash Wednesday, and the Lower East Side will reportedly be giving up another cultural holdout, Moishe’s Kosher Bake Shop on 2nd Ave. Moishe’s is rumored to have started on Houston in the late 1960’s before moving to its location at 115 Second Avenue in the mid-70’s, meaning that it has been in operation for close to 50 years in one form or another. While Moishe Perl seems to have indicated to various people that the business is closed, by the time I got to Moishe’s myself a little while ago, brown paper covered the windows and door, and a sign placed in the window read “Closed for renovation, reopen as soon as possible, special order please call owner (347) 203-9842”. When I called the number, Moishe  Perl picked up the phone, but wouldn't give a clear answer to what the future of the building was before the call cut out.        The last interaction I had with Moishe was at the end of last week when I stopped b...