The Lower Eastside Girls Club, perhaps one of the most incredible community organizations to have ever existed, is looking for a Director of Development:
The Lower Eastside Girls Club is seeking a Director of Development responsible for driving an annual income of $1,000,000 by overseeing individual giving, fundraising events and institutional funding from foundations, corporations, and government sources, as well as all communications, public relations, and marketing. This position will be 90% fundraising and 10% communications.
The Villager has the scoop on the near-destruction of St. Brigid’s church:
State Supreme Court Justice Michael Stallman issued a temporary restraining order against the demolition pending a July 25 hearing.
The lawsuit is the latest effort by the Committee to Save St. Brigid’s to preserve the 1848 church building at 119 Avenue B, which was closed in 2001 because of a dangerous crack in the east wall, and to revive their parish, which the archdiocese dissolved in 2004.
I went to a community development forum not too long ago where one of the representative’s of St. Brigid’s spoke. It’s horrific what the congregation has had to deal with. Long story short, the arch diocese told them they had to close because it was going to cost too much to repair a crack in the wall. The members of the church got together and got their own estimate of the damage, which was something like 1/3 of what the diocese had estimated.
They then raised money to have the repairs made, around $100,000, but still fell short; the diocese kept the church closed, AND kept the money raised. They want to destroy the building and sell the land — to residential developers for a killing.
Greed + God — two great tastes that go great together. In the meantime, actual believers are out on the street with no place to worship or have a sense of community.
KPMG released a report today saying that Lala Land is the biggest market for ‘new urban development’ (read: destruction of character of neighborhoods to make way for white-washed, glossy (sub)urbia.) But! Here’s what they said about the LES:
Ride the subway of love: At the 2000 census there were 106,000 never-married men and 104,000 never-married women living on Manhattan Island. However in one Lower East Side neighbourhood there were 2.41 never-married young men per never-married young woman. Tell the girls from Sex and the City that this is Manhattan’s bachelor hotspot. The bachelorette hotspot was a precinct in the Upper East Side where there were 2.45 bachelorettes per bachelor. The bachelorette hotspot is linked to the bachelor hotspot by the Bronx/Brooklyn Subway lines 4, 5 and 6. When you next visit New York perhaps you might like to ride this “subway of love.”
Errrrrr, yeah. Does this explain the radical differences in the two neighborhoods? At all? Maybe a little?
Those wacky Brits and their facts… from The Observer:
As its title makes plain, Bernstein and Sondheim’s musical West Side Story is set in Manhattan’s West Side, not the Lower East Side, as we said in ‘Now try this’ (Review, last week). In Jerome Robbins’s original conception, the star-crossed lovers were to have been a Jewish girl and an Italian Catholic boy, with the action set in the Lower East Side. Hence the title might have been East Side Story. The idea was later changed to the West Side story of American and Puerto Rican gangs. And it opened in 1957, not 1961 (the year of the film’s release).
Even with me being a huge fan, I didn’t know the orignal storyline….
For those of you who’ve been waiting all these years, 1989’s Slaves of New York (set here in the neighborhood) is coming out on DVD on Tuesday. Reviews are welcome (ahem, Rachel).
My God. This woman was stabbed 13 times at the Bowery stop on the J train when a guy tried to take her purse from her. She screamed after he took his hand off her mouth, and he stabbed her with a pen knife:
After stabbing and slashing the woman 13 times, the suspect began punching her in the face until one of his blows finally knocked her out, police said.
“He punched her until she stopped screaming,” a police source said.
More over at
Newsday.
In other stabbing news (welcome to 1985?), a guy has been arrested for the stabbing death of a 75-year-old man on Henry Street a week ago.
I had a lovely chat with Danny, one of the owners of Kingsize on Essex Street, last night. It was my first visit to the place; originally, it was a coffee shop, but evidently they just weren’t getting the business. Now it’s a little bar with two seriously kick-ass little back rooms and great drink specials, and you can order from the other owner’s establishment — Il Bagatto on 2nd Street. Yum.
Anyhoo, Danny and I got to talkin’ about how bars operate in the neighborhood, and how the top section of Ludlow and Orchard have been turned into Bourbon Street, right along with St. Mark’s Place… this sort of Disney-fied frathouse hotspot. It’s distressing, and I was curious about what a new bar owner would think about being in a relatively “quiet” part of the LES.
He said that he liked being the only bar on the block, because it retained the original charm of the area, with all the different kinds of shops and people that are there. Women have said they’re glad that Kingsize is open there now, because it’s the only thing on the block that is at night, and they feel safer. He watches out for his neighbors upstairs and all around, and makes sure the music isn’t too loud and the smokers aren’t raising hell. He had the opportunity to make one of the back rooms a garden, which would have brought more business, but he didn’t want to risk ruining his relationship with the neighbors and making enemies. (He also likes the same bar owners that I like — Lucky Jack, Whiskey Ward, etc.)
My god, he’s a model bar owner. Give him your money, if it is booze that ye seek.
Interesting article about the disappearing Bowery, in which two people I worked for were quoted. (Hi boys!) Best quote goes to Luc Sante, author of “Low Life:”
“‘Every city needs its dark conscience, a forbidden place where most of its respectable citizens don’t go, but go there anyway,’ said Sante, a visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College in upstate New York. ‘In a generation, the Bowery will be a misty memory.’”
Amen. A-freakin’-men.
Oh my god, it all makes sense:
Many hangover sufferers looking for someone or something to blame can now point the finger at their own genes, according to a new study.
Mutations in a specific gene inactivate a key enzyme and slow the elimination of acetaldehyde — the first product of alcohol metabolism — from the body, say Japanese researchers reporting in the July issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.”
(Via the smarty-smarty ladies of the Huffington Post Newswire.)
The LES Tenement Museum is looking for a Development Director for its new program, International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience. I just went to the new location at Orchard and Delancey over the weekend with Rachel, btw, and they have a seriously kick-ass collection of NYC books. We drooled heavily.
