10th Street

Back in 2007 and then again in 2008, the southeast corner of 10th Street and 4th Avenue was falling to make room for a new boutique hotel. And then it wasn't.

Now it looks like it's falling again. It's recently been wrapped in demolition scaffolding and a worker confirmed, "It's coming down."



Over the years, the little low-rise building became a kind of public message board. What will the 10th Street Scribbler do when his canvas is gone?

10th and 4th

After years in flux, the southeast corner of East 10th Street and 4th Avenue has returned to the market. Massey Knakal just put up a pair of banners and listed the price for 71 4th Avenue at $24 million.



We started following this corner in 2007, when rumors circulated about the demolition of the block's historic artist studio buildings and the coming of high-rise construction. St. Marx Music (formerly a branch of the Atlas Barber School) and the Green East grocer were booted out.

The site was covered in plywood and neglected. In 2008, we learned the corner would be demolished to make room for a boutique hotel. It looked like the low-rise buildings would be coming down, but they didn't.

Since then, the only activity on this building has come from the Scribbler, a strange graffitist who regularly covered the plywood with his angry messages. But some time in the past year, the Scribbler stopped scribbling.

With the Death Star risen and the Hyatt Union Square just opened nearby, we may soon see another dull glass box for the neighborhood--on a sleepy block that was once the home of celebrated galleries and artists like Willem DeKooning.


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Says the listing, "Plans exist for a nine story mixed-use building with 8 floor through apartments and a bi-level retail space with double height ceilings."

With all that glass, let's hope the Scribbler has his permanent-ink Magic Markers at the ready.


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today

CIA on East 4th

On 12th Street outside Strand Books, the asphalt is littered with small, white squares of paper. Is it trash or an important yet cryptic message from one of the city's forgotten souls? (Unless it's a viral marketing campaign hyping a new spy movie.)



Entitled C.I.A. FRAME? the double-sided note, scanned below, is desperate, from someone "completely isolated" and "forced" to use the leaflet method "in order to reach as many persons as is possible with just one action." (They are also apparently without Internet access, or else they'd be blogging it).

They say they are the "target of a very powerful cult, perhaps not a cult at all." There is harassment, violence, and the use of powerful tracking chemicals.



All of this is happening on East 4th Street, near Avenue C. "This residential street," says the isolated leafletter, "can be very active or very quiet, at the wishes of this group." The entire street may be controlled by the CIA. Most of the suspicious activity occurs between 320 and 355 E. 4th, but especially in front of 336.



Indeed, in the Google Maps image of #336, some suspicious characters appear--with their faces conspicuously blurred. Don't be fooled by the elderly woman in the striped shirt. She may be one of them.

Finally, the leafletter warns us, "It is conceivable that a large distracting event will occur after the distribution of this flyer."

Residents of East 4th Street, be on the lookout.



Also read:
A Flutter of Paper

And the saga of The Scribbler:
Scribbler Love
10th Street Graffiti
10th Street Scribbler
Scribbler Strikes Again
And More Scribbler

Scribbler Love

After a long hiatus, during which time he moved tentatively to the plywood around the Sam Chang hotel on 13th St. and 4th Ave., The Scribbler is back to writing his anti-government, anti-psychotherapy, pro-cigarette notes on the wall at 10th and 4th, thanks in large part to some colorful "Pollinate" posters that provided an open surface on which to write in the mess of advertisements this wall has become.



As usual, the Scribbler's rants have inspired response rants from passersby. Most of them are angry, correcting, and/or snarky.



But one person sent the Scribbler a bit of love, saying, "I for one totaly missed you rock on crazy guy."

I had missed him, too, and was glad to find that I was not alone in missing him, and that someone else had seen fit to say so with a Magic Marker, letting us know that this wall and its notes have become important, however ephemeral, however small.



Since taking these photos, the Scribbler has been covered up again.

Previously:
10th Street Graffiti
10th Street Scribbler
Scribbler Strikes Again
And More Scribbler
&
10th Street Falling

*Everyday Chatter

Demolished and unpreserved Day-O now totally plywooded and padlocked in utter secrecy:


Remembering the old days of Max Fish: "It wasn’t what it is today: chicks with $5,000 bags thrown on the floor drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon." [NYT]

Lower Second Avenue gets a new restaurant with an appropriate name: Heartbreak. [EVG]

As bloggers sell Brooklyn for Ford cars, a borough becomes a major brand. [NYT]

MCNY digitizes portion of photo archives--bloggers cream their jeans. [MCNY]

Bed Bugs make Village Voice top 10 for 2010. [RS]

The latest from the Scribbler Wall:

New Scribbler

As the Scribbler seems to have stopped adding commentary to the 10th Street wall, having filled every available white space, a new Scribbler offers similar communication in spots across the East Village.

The New Scribbler worries about the treatment of the mentally ill, Obama, the economy, just like the Original Scribbler. But this graffitist is also worried about new strains of the influenza virus, the possibility that diabetes is being used as a form of genocide, and torture at the hands of the CIA.





Brainwashing and witchcraft, stem cell cures, Obama's relationship to Big Pharma--it's all unholy and undead.



Stripping and pornography, NAMBLA, and "2 trillion to bail out Jews" during World War II--"what in return? What about us?" It's the voice of the American far right, gone mad, scribbling its way in small letters across the city.

*Everyday Chatter

The dialogue on the Scribbler wall is what we had before we had online comment threads, just plain old ink. Now the wall is going "post-digital," with the addition of something called the Street Tweet:


A conference was held this week to look at how “the city is facing new threats to its longtime dominance in the creative fields" as artists are pushed out. What did they discover? [CNY]

Take a field trip to "one of New York City’s best-kept secrets,"Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Materials Store. [TC]

Television ads are being installed on subway cars. Another assault for the senses. [RS]

"It's not every night you see Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker hanging out in the back room of a dimly lit bar on lower Avenue C." [Grub]

Aces & 8s tries rebranding strategy to quell E. Villagers' ire. [EVG]

The Bowery's Billy Leroy cleared of charges for selling subway signage. [WSJ]

Fashionista shoppers. Waiting in line. In their underpants. [Racked]

And in case you didn't notice: Stupid Is Spreading. Here is what The Idiocracy looks like:

And More Scribbler

Messages from the Scribbler of East 10th Street were covered up when his wall of choice was whitewashed a few weeks ago. Undeterred, enjoying a fresh expanse of empty page, he struck again, printing out his political messages in old-school analog style.



He tells us that "America is being run by dead white men," including Marx and Stalin, and some white men still alive but "maybe" dead, including Bloomberg and "Meathead"--is that a reference to Michael Stivic?

He attacks his usual targets: psychotherapy, the Jews, Communism, anti-smokers, politicians...then gets splashed by someone quoting George Orwell's Big Brother in red paint: WAR IS PEACE.



The Scribbler is having none of that. "Orwell was a Red," he responds. "And so is Bloomberg."





He goes over the sections of his script that have been covered in red paint, darkening the letters in Magic Marker, crossing out responses from other scribblers, responding to their retorts. The "thread," as it were is not linear, like a blog comment thread, but swirls around. Your eye moves up and down, right and left, trying to follow the inked conversation.



Finally, he lights out for unscribbled territory around the corner of the plywood, to the avenue side where he rarely ventures. In that still-white expanse, he adds a bit of curious history: Hitler was the first PETA.





Previously:
10th Street Graffiti
10th Street Scribbler
Scribbler Strikes Again

Scribbler Strikes Again

Back to 10th Street, where we last saw the Scribbler had admonished us to boycott the movies, because smoking is illegal in cinemas. Now, in fresh ink, he lends support to former Northern Exposure actress and tea-partier Janine Turner, who runs the Constituting America website.



The Scribbler tells us that Janine is being blacklisted by the "internazis" of Red Hollywood, who resemble "vermin like psychotherapists and 3-term mayors."

And while the Scribbler strongly supports our right to smoke in public, he launches this attack on Hollywood for teaching us to smoke in the first place, an indication that the Scribbler might feel some ambivalence about cigarettes.



Further down the plywood, we see a compatriot of the Scribbler has provided some cryptic mathematics:

Bloomberg = 8 yrs =/+ 11 BILL
Smokers 8 yrs, 10-12-PACK

What could it mean except: "Smoking Good, Bloomberg Bad"? And fascism lives. "But," says a newcomer in barely legible ballpoint, "smokers don't." Live, that is. "Be grateful!"



The addition of the Communist hammer and sickle might indicate the red politics of this writer, which I will call the Communist Smoker. It also begs the intriguing question: Could the anti-Red Scribbler and the Communist Smoker be on the same side? Could they be alters of the same individual?

Read back:
Scribbler 1
Scribbler 2

10th St. Scribbler

Following up on the evolving graffiti wall of 10th Street, which is allowed to unfold more organically than another "graffiti" wall I can think of, the Paranoid Scribbler, as I have come to fondly think of him (or her, though I rather doubt it), has responded to Bloomberg's war on cigarette smoking.



The Scribbler tells us to boycott every place you cannot smoke, including movie theaters, where smoking has been illegal since the 1960s.

A small question mark after "politbureu" indicates some concern about his spelling, especially after other graffitists have corrected him. Spelling is not the Scribbler's strong suit. He tells us we should also boycott Medea, that vengeful Greek who killed her own children.



And now the Scribbler has competition. A conspiracy theorist with access to a computer and printer has one-upped the magic-marker makings of the Scribbler with illustrated flyers about the BP oil spill and the war on drugs--both of which, the flyer-maker claims, are canards.

The Scribbler agrees on the oil spill point, but has yet to weigh in about the war on drugs.