R.I.P. Stomp

Today is the last performance of Stomp. If you're not familiar with it, it's a wordless stage show of a group of performers creating music and choreography entirely acoustically, using found objects and industrial materials like garbage can lids, brooms, radiator hoses, and the like. It's been at this same location for 29 years, performing 11,472 times.

I've never seen the show, but it's still a landmark of the Lower East Side. I've walked past its distinctive marquee a million times. I did this drawing as part of Save Our Stages series. Stomp was able to re-open after pandemic restrictions were lifted, but the international tourists who made up a large part of its audience have not returned, at least to this venue. The building has a long, long history, stretching back to the early 20th century as part of the Yiddish Theater, and later home to the original Little Shop of Horrors, John Leguizamo's Mambo Mouth, and Eric Bogosian's Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. Hopefully, that tradition continues.

EV Grieve: Bang Gone: Stomp's Long Run On 2nd Avenue Concludes

RIP J. Baczynsky

I drew this a few years ago, and wrote about its history here. This store has been here in the Lower East Side of New York since 1970. I learned today that the owner, a Ukrainian immigrant named Julian Baczynsky, passed away this week at the age of 98. I didn't know him and I never shopped there, but have passed by it hundreds of times. Word is, the business will continue, which is good news.

Obituary via EV Grieve.com

Middle Collegiate Church

 A drawing from four years ago of a lamp mounted to the Middle Collegiate Church on Second Avenue. I used to pass this church every day when I was at NYU. The church was built in 1891. Last night, a fire broke out in a neighboring building and spread to the church. It looks like it's a total loss.

Essex Card Shop

Essex Card Shop, on Avenue A between 2nd and 3rd St. It's packed full of useful items, and not-so-useful kitschy souvenirs, and all the merchandise and services advertised on its many signs.

It is co-owned by Jayant Patel, an Indian immigrant, and M. Aslam, who is from Pakistan. Mr. Patel originally ran the store on the Upper West Side, and re-located to the East Village in 2000, and was soon joined by Mr. Aslam. On the partnership of an Indian and a Pakistani, Mr. Patel said in a 2012 interview, "Politics destroy nations, not businesses. There is no politics here, just business and friendship. Normal people, ordinary people don't have those problems. It is just the leaders who care about this nonsense."

Patel wrote a memoir about his immigrant experience that was made into a movie called Desperate Endeavors. You can see the trailer here.  In that interview, he says he wanted to retire after the success of his movie. Unfortunately, Desperate Endeavors did not set the box office on fire. But the store remains. They had a second business on the next block, a copy shop, which recently shuttered. Hopefully, this store will survive, but I suspect this belongs on my "Before It's Gone" list.

Some last words of wisdom from Jayant Patel (again from that profile: "My philosophy is 'truth, love, and honesty.' It's universal. Trust is something everyone follows. If you are truthful then people will trust you. I see myself as Muslim, Hindu, Christian, all in one. If you're nice to people, people are friendly. People in New York are good. New York is a tough town, but it's full of good people if you stop and experience it. Life is hard and not always comfortable. Struggle makes you strong and I don't mind it."



Local East Village: Making It - Jayant Patel and M. Aslam of Essex Card Shop

Renwick Triangle

The Renwick Triangle houses fill this point created by East 10th St. and Stuyvesant St. It's a series of seven Anglo-Italianate style houses built in 1862 by James Renwick, one of the most prominent American architects of the time. Some of his other buildings are the Smithsonian Instituiton, the Grace Church, St Patrick's Cathedral, and St. Bartholomew's Church, notable because that's where I met my wife.

This short stretch of Stuyvesant St. is all that remains of the original, which once stretched much further across the island. The land was owned by the Stuyvesant and Fish families, and connected to St. Mark's Church, directly across the street. The road originally ran through Peter Stuyvesant's farm, to his manor. It lay just outside what was then the city limits, and became a marketplace for farmers and vendors, since they could avoid the city's market tax.

Besides Broadway, it's the only diagonal street remaining after the Commissioner's Plan of 1811 imposed a strict grid over most of Manhattan. Also, while we think of the streets of the Manhattan grid as running north-south on the avenues, and east-west on the streets, in fact it is at a 28.9 degree offset. Stuyvesant Street, on its diagonal, is actually one of the only NYC streets that runs true east-west.

In front of the building is the Abe Lebewohl Triangle. At 0.01 acres, it is one of the smallest parks in New York City. It was named after a Ukrainian immigrant who became a prominent member of the community and owned the famous Second Avenue Deli. He was killed in an unsolved murder in 1996.


Sources and more history:
Forgotten NY: Mr Stuyvesant's Garden: One Of The Few Diagonal Streets In NYC

Untapped Cities: Stuyvesant Street, One of Manhattan's Few Diagonal Streets

Untapped Cities: The 10 Smallest Parks In Manhattan

East Village Meat Market

Julian Baczynsky immigrated to the United States from the Ukraine in 1950, and opened the East Village Meat Market in 1970. The area had long been known as Little Ukraine, since a surge in immigration from Russia, Ukraine, and Poland at the end of the 19th century. It's the last of its kind in the neighborhood, and one of just a few remaining Ukrainian institutions in the area. It stocks imported items from Poland and Ukraine, but is known for smoked meats and sausages and hams, which are cured on the premises.

The building was built in 1900 as an "Old Law Tenement." These were tenement buildings hurriedly built by developers before the more stringent, and costly, provisions of the New York State Tenement House Act ("New Law") took effect in 1901. They were also known as "Dumbbell Tenements" because the apartment floor plans resembled a dumb bell, with small airshafts in the middle of the building providing the legal minimum amount of air and light into the rooms.

Dumbbell tenement floor plan, via GVHSP site

Previously, the site had been a branch of the New York Hospital for expectant mothers, established in 1799.



East Village Meat Market

Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation

Wikipedia: Old Law Tenement

Zoltar

My first sketch of 2018. New York had two solid weeks of below-freezing temperatures, but it finally warmed up. Which was still in the 30's, but it felt downright balmy. Zoltar has been on my To-Draw list for a while.

This Zoltar Fortune Teller stands in front of Gem Spa at the corner of Second Ave. and St Mark's Place. Despite its name, the store has nothing to do with gems or spas. "Gem" supposedly is an anagram of Gladys, Etta, and Miriam, the wives of the store's previous owners. I don't know why it's called "Spa." It's a corner store/newsstand known for its egg creams, and was a counter-culture center for the Beats and then the hippies in the 50s and 60s.

Zoltar is probably most famous today from his appearance in the movie Big, but I was surprised to learn that there's been a long line of Zoltar (or Zoltan) machines. This is the last one in New York City. There used to be one at FAO Schwarz, and there was one at Coney Island that was destroyed by Superstorm Sandy. The store has been there since the 1920s, but Zoltar has only been there since 2012. He continually spouts those four phrases, beckoning the East Village passerby. I didn't spend the two dollars to get my fortune. From what I've read, Zoltar just spits out a ticket with a fortune cookie-type saying on it. People seem disappointed by this, but really, what were they expecting?

Echeverri's Palace

For the past several years, I've spent a few summer weeks in the Lower East Side working on a festival for Clubbed Thumb theater company. Around the corner, at Avenue B and East 4th St., stands this distinctive building. I finally got around to drawing it this summer, and then discovered the great story behind it.

This Village Voice article by Jess McHugh from 2016 tells the story. The building is owned by Antonio Echeverri, a Colombian immigrant who worked numerous jobs including maintaining buildings and saved for 20 years before purchasing this property in 1992. It was dilapidated, infested with vermin and drug dealers, and close to being condemned. Echeverri rehabilitated the building himself. "Now it's a palace. It's a paradise," he says in the article. Echeverri repaints the facade every five years, and is continually working on the building. Even the tree encasements on the sidewalk are in this distinctive style. “Every mind is its own world. I like to see things that are different from my everyday surroundings. I don’t like plain brick.”

Not only did he do the renovation himself, but he even mixes the paint himself, and casts the concrete ornamental sculptures himself, as seen on the East 4th Street entrance.

This creative attention to detail extends to the interior, a bit of which you can see in that Voice article. I'd love to get a look inside someday. 

“It gives me joy to see that people come by to admire the building, especially the door,” Echeverri says. “The door has stars, the sun and moons on it. We’re all part of the same universe, and the door is where I capture mine.”

Deutsch-Amerikansche Schützen Gesellschaft

This building on St. Mark's Place is a remnant of Kleindeutschland, or "Little Germany." In the late 19th century, the Lower East Side was home to a huge German immigrant community. At its height, it was the third largest German population center in the world, after Berlin and Vienna.

This building, built in 1888, was one of architect William C. Frohne's first major commissions, and housed the Deutsch-Amerikansche Schützen Gesellschaft, or German-American Shooting Society, an umbrella group for two dozen shooting clubs. There was a shooting range on site, though most of the actual shooting happened in Queens, including the annual shooting contest called Schuetzenfest. It also housed a bowling alley, a saloon, and lodging, and a meeting hall, which was frequently used by unions and labor groups. The slogan at the top - "Einigkeit Macht Stark" - means "Unity Makes Strong." I find it interesting that this facade remained intact through two world wars with Germany, considering how many Americans currently regard immigrant communities.

The German-American Shooting Society owned the building until 1920, by which time Little Germany had largely dissipated. It was subsequently used as a homeless shelter, a Polish community center and then a Ukrainian one, and the original site of St. Mark's Bookshop. Today it houses a vegan Latin restaurant on the ground floor, and a yoga studio above.

For more history of the shooting society and Little Germany, see:

Ephemeral New York: An 1880s shooting gallery on St. Mark's Place

Dayton in Manhattan: The 1889 Schuetzen Hall - 12 St Marks Place

Wikipedia: Little Germany, Manhattan

Collegiate Church Lamppost

Lamp on the facade of the Middle Collegiate Church on 2nd Ave. in the East Village. The church dates to 1892

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