To Keep An Eye On: 527 Grand Street & Luther Gulick Playground

Last month, Bowery Boogie reported that the building at 527 Grand Street, home to the People Choice Pharmacy, went on the market for $5.4 million. Dating back to 1857, this structure at the intersection of Grand and Henry, has long served as some sort of deli/grocery/pharmacy for the surrounding public and coop housing. Listings for 527 Grand Street prominently advertise the air rights that come with the purchase, almost 550 feet for a new residential building or over 4,000 for a commercial building –– the sky's the limit for your dream corner property.

Two blocks down Columbia will bring you to Luther Gulick Playground, a desolate stretch behind the Amalgamated Dwellings (one of the oldest housing cooperatives in the United States), named after Luther Gulick, the "Godfather of Basketball", NYC public school advocate, and founder of the Public School Athletic League. The playground was built in the early 1930's, originally as the Bernard Downing Playground (named after the recently deceased minority leader of the NYS Senate), and was renamed after Gulick in 1985. In the early 2000's, during the city's attempts to contain the infestations of Asian Longhorn Beetles, many of the trees within and around the playground were cut down. Soon after, community groups and local residents began campaigning for the park's restoration, convincing the city to allocate money to the project. While the design stage for the new park began in 2011, construction will begin on Luther Gulick Playground next month, coinciding with the broader push to compensate for the East River Park's eventual closure.

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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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