Karen Saves the Day

With the news that Love Saves the Day will be leaving the East Village, and the city, I went to talk with Karen, the vendor who's been selling her wares on the sidewalk in front of the shop for the past few years.



An old-school flea marketeer, her tables are laden with items ranging from the sublime (a white, bejeweled prom gown; vintage framed photos of breeders with their champion dogs; a giant mid-century Santa) to the merely utilitarian (a few coffee mugs, a phone handset without a cradle, a tennis racket). In the bustle of midday, people stop and browse. A girl buys a sweater off the rack and, hearing Karen's price, says, "That is totally fair."

"I keep my prices low," Karen told me, "because a lot of people around here are kids, and they don't have much money. And people donate stuff to me. So I recycle it back through the neighborhood."



One donation she received came from a woman pushing a walker. The woman stopped and, without a word, handed a plastic bag to Karen. Inside was a homemade sandwich and a can of Coke.

"Where else are you gonna find people like this? People who bring you sandwiches," Karen said. She loves being on this corner and does not want to leave the East Village, where she was brought by Leslie Herson, the former owner of Love Saves the Day who passed away this summer.

"Leslie was one of the last of the original flower children," Karen told me. She met Leslie through the flea market circles in New Jersey. "She invited me to come to New York. New York! That was always my dream. So I followed her here and I've been here since. Leslie was good to me."



I asked Karen what she thought about the loss of Love Saves the Day.

"This is one of the last places that has the old flair of the East Village that's gone. It's not like it was in the 50s and 60s, that old bohemian and hippie life. It's missed. And I'm one of the last ones out here, selling on the sidewalks, which used to be full of people selling stuff. So I guess I'll be missed, too."

Karen will be missed. But she's looking for a new place to set up. If you have a storefront, or know of one, that can accommodate Karen, she asks that you get in touch. You can leave your information here in the comments section or send it to me by email and I will pass it on. You can also find Karen at the corner of 7th and 2nd every Friday - Sunday. At least for the next few weeks, until Love is gone.

See all my photos of Karen's "shop" and LSD

*Everyday Chatter

Does Karma have the best noise control in the EV--or are they getting the most complaints? To their two existing "shut up" signs, they've added two huge posters outside, one tied to the gate of the hardware store next door and another tied to a tree trunk. And who knew beer companies were now sponsoring urban etiquette signs?


"I Hearted NY Before You Moved Here and Made It Suck." [FP] ...is this the source of those stickers?

Chat about the Sinatra days with some Village characters at Lenny's Something Special. [GVDP]

Two Greenpoint maps: One of the gentrifying nabes and one of the nabes soaked in toxic gases.

Luxury is not immune to the failing economy: Sales fall and “It’s not politically correct to show off in this environment." [NYT]

Will the city be filled with empty, half-finished condo towers, skeletons of a dead age blowing construction debris? [NYT]

Meanwhile, other condo developers are offering buyers a money-back guarantee. How about a set of Ginsu knives? [NYT]

10th Street Falling

Here comes another boutique hotel.

Recall back to last year's stories about the demise of East 10th Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues. Since then, the one-story building on the corner--a structure that held a bodega, record shop, check-cashing place, Chinese takeout, and part of the Atlas Barber School--has been gradually sinking into squalor after a stop-work order stopped demolition for the rumored hotel to come.

Now, X's are spray-painted on the facade and the skull and crossbones of rat baiting have appeared in the windows. Sure signs of imminent demolition. But what troubles me most today is that those skull-and-crossbones stickers have also been placed in the windows of the brick townhouse next door.



I talked to an employee in one of the shops on the block who filled me in. The owner of the townhouse sold it to a pair of hoteliers who want to take down the corner and put in a boutique hotel. (I don't know who they are or what their plans are, other than that they're building a hotel.) Blockshopper has more info on the sale, which went through in May for $5,430,000 (Halstead report).

The employee thought the developers would be using the townhouse as their construction office. So then why the rat baiting? I've never seen a rat-stickered building that did not soon vanish.



Built in 1900, 82 East 10th Street may have housed the Hilda Carmel Gallery in the 1950s, where Pollock, Rothko, and de Kooning had their work. This block was once the home of the New York School art scene, where galleries like Tanager and the studio of de Kooning helped give birth to the Abstract Expressionist movement.

The LIFE archives turned up a fantastic series of photos by James Burke, highlighting the art scene on this block in 1956. In this overview shot, you can see how that entire side of the block was once townhouses and tenements. (Click the photo credit links below to see more and larger images.)


photo: James Burke for LIFE

You can also see, on the right, what came down for the single-story now about to fall. It's hard to imagine a city in which taller structures are replaced with smaller ones. Today, the sign for LOFTS & SPACE is still a ghost on the upper brick wall above MORAL's fire extinguisher tag and the giant silver penis.

Here's another shot, aiming west from the south side of 10th Street, looking directly at the doomed corner. Of course, almost everything on the north side has been wiped out.


photo: James Burke for LIFE

I think this liquor store is at 95 East 10th (now Sundaes and Cones), which became the March Gallery a year after this photo in 1957. For added color, here's a bit of artist statement from a 1961 show at the March:

Stanley Fisher: "Anti-art uses all the groping varicose brains of science fiction and the Pin-up cheesecake of the calendar magazines and the gloss of Life and Times and the plush-slush comic strips and the byzantine Boweries of Lower Broadway and the balling Off-Broadway and Buchenwald and H-bombs bopping and the colored condoms of that detention-dimension, Hollywood, and its vomitorium of video."

And here's the block today, where five of the original buildings still stand. The one on the left, where Danal used to be and which is still for rent, housed the Tanager Gallery:

*Everyday Chatter

Bad, bad news for the old Bowery: Bari is finally selling their giant parcel of properties. Make way for more and more and more towers of tin and glass. [EVG]

The notorious East Village Portfolio goes back on the auction block--including those 12th and A corners--for a bazillion dollars. How many more tenants will be shaken out this time around? [Curbed]

Chinatown protesters shout down Chatham Square redesign a "sham" forced upon the neighborhood. And the Bloomdozer keeps chugging along. [DTE]

Christine's is definitely not being renovated. It's vanished and for rent:


The bar that dare not choose a name on 4th and 2nd is getting into the sideshow game as they look for bartenders with "flare skills and fire shows." [HG]

Broke-Ass Stuart's guide to living on the cheap in NYC just came out. Good timing. [BAS]

Taking Over

I went to see Danny Hoch's impressive one-man show "Taking Over" at the Public Theater. (Recently extended!) I expected a performance filled with righteous anger and I was not disappointed. In every character he inhabits, whether it's an elderly African-American woman watching her world evaporate or a greedy real-estate developer laying out plans to destroy that world, he paints a powerful, pitch-perfect portrait of a city painfully vanishing.

What I did not expect was to get a dose of my own vitriol. Hoch's anger is pointedly directed at non-native New Yorkers, to whom he bellows in agonized rage: "Go home!"



I walked out of the theater sorting through mixed feelings. I'm on Hoch's side, but I'm an "outsider," too. Does he want me to go home? This is home. So when does one become a New Yorker--after 15, 25, 50 years? Is it ever possible? Allen Ginsberg came from Newark and Frank O'Hara was from Baltimore. Andy Warhol came from Pittsburgh, Patti Smith from Chicago. George M. Cohan was from Providence and Mickey Mantle came from a small town in Oklahoma.

For solace, I turned to one of my favorite books, Here Is New York, written in 1949 by E.B. White--who was born in Mount Vernon, just over the Bronx border so not, technically, a city native.

After reading the following excerpt, I gained some comfort, but also a new reason to be angry. It shows that until very recently in New York's history, its "settlers" were viewed as a valuable asset to the city, to its passion and thrum and creativity. But today's swarm of new arrivals have radically altered what it means to be a settler here. Do they bring "poetical deportment," or do they just deport those who came before them?

I don't want to be lumped in with them. Can I get a pardon? Anyway, go see Hoch's fantastic show. In the meantime, here's E.B. Try to imagine saying his words about small town girls and boys today. It seems unfathomable.



“There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter--the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

Of these three trembling cities, the greatest is the last--the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York's high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.

Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.

And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company."

*Everyday Chatter

The ways of colonization can be subtle. Note the altered, re-branded "R's" in the old Bouwerie Lane sign:


Check out Nathan Kensinger's cool shots of the weird world beneath the Coney Island boardwalk. [NK]

Potemkin Village: "McNally wanted [Pastis] to look like it had been in the neighborhood for years, so Bologna constructed this narrative of a family that had maintained the restaurant for a century." [Eater]

Take a dance around the Blarney Cove. [EVG]

Visit Cafe Reggio--without the tourists. [GVDP]

Frozen New York

Nick Paumgarten in this week's New Yorker wonders what the city will look like in our new Depression. He imagines the future. A quick look around town reveals that the future is now:

"Walking or riding along the avenues, you can imagine the storefronts without tenants. Bank branches, juice bars, shops selling electronics and scarves: all of them gone, unable to make the rent, and the landlords, verging on default, unable to lure replacements."


8th Street ghost town

"A friend who worked in Southeast Asia in the nineteen-nineties, during the recession there, recalls visiting Bangkok and Jakarta to see the abandoned high-rises of the preceding economic boom. He found ranges of half-finished buildings, derelict superstructures occupied by tent shanties and with squatters gathered around fires. It may be no great leap from there to a vision here of burning garbage cans and jerry-rigged cardboard in Washington Mutual’s cashless vestibules or the bare aisles of Circuit City."


14th St and 7th Ave


Little West 12th

"We have inherited, from the good years, a glut of housing, almost all of it of the unaffordable kind—condos galore—and an increase in office space amid a sudden, steep decrease in the need for it. Throw in the high cost, or total unavailability, of capital, owing to the credit freeze, and you have a New York that may be frozen in time."


4th Ave, Park Slope

Related posts:
New York Pentimento
Manhattan Apocalypse