On the Waterfront

I've been spending a lot of time at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a Visiting Artist, quickly filling up the sketchbook I've dedicated to that project. I'd planned to try to fill one book during my stint there, but maybe it'll wind up being two? Anyway, here's a couple, roughly grouped under the subject of "mooring." Thanks to my sister-in-law, who attended the the Maine Maritime Academy, for helping me to identify what some of these things are called.

Exhibit: Scenes From The East Village, L.E.S., and Chinatown

A regular gig of mine is working for Clubbed Thumb's annual festival of new plays, Summerworks, and this year they are graciously presenting a show of my works in the lobby of the venue, The Wild Project. As the festival has long had its home in the Lower East Side, the show focuses on drawings from the surrounding area - The Lower East Side, the East Village, and Chinatown. On view through June 30.

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