Saying Goodbye To: SideWalk Cafe & Hells Angels Clubhouse

Today will be the SideWalk Cafe's last day after 33 years on Avenue A. For the last twenty-five of those years, SideWalk has been home to the annual Anti-folk Festival, which will have its last performance at the venue tonight as well as the final open mic night (one of the longest running open-mics in the city). For many, the SideWalk Cafe was the home of the anti-folk scene, providing a stage for the burgeoning careers of many, including Jeffrey Lewis, the Moldy Peaches, Beck, Regina Spektor, and more. While ownership of SideWalk changed hands last year, it was unclear what would be come of it until recently. For those who want a last taste, there are performances going on all day starting at 3pm, with closing ceremonies around midnight.

Yesterday, LES residents learned that the "safest block in NY" will have to relinquish that title, as the Hells Angels prepare to sell their clubhouse at 77 E. 3rd Street. Holding court on this block for 50 years, the Hells Angels faced off numbers of attempts by the state and federal governments to remove them in the 80's and 90's. Gone are the days of fighting cops on the street, in recent years the Hells Angels have been involved in disputes with their neighbors, tourists, and the city, as well as internal strife over the ownership of the building (reportedly purchased by the "The Church of Angels" non-profit group for $1900 in the late 70's). Nobody has been able to reach any HA members for comment, with EV Grieve reporting that Ron Kuby (notable defense attorney and legal support for the Hells Angels in the past) was unaware of any sale. Technically, the building itself has not officially sold, only the form preceding the sale has been filed, we will have to wait to find out when it closes or what will happen to the clubhouse.

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Union of Orthodox Rabbis Building Bought and Emptied –– Artifacts Remain

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...

Former "Mayor of James Street" and Gangster-turned-Undertaker, 'Roxie' Vanella's Funeral Chapel Sells For $7.8M

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...

UPDATE: Hells Angels Leave Third Street for Greener Pastures

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...

A Hidden Lower East Side

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