Fingers crossed: Earlier this month, the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, heard the appeal on the community lawsuit against New York University’s South Village expansion megaplan. Among those watching in the courtroom on June 2 were Mark Crispin Miller, the leader of N.Y.U. Faculty Against the Sexton Plan, Terri Cude, Bo Riccobono and Assemblymember Deborah Glick, who is a petitioner on the lawsuit. There weren’t really any new arguments presented, according to Miller. “The court has long since digested all the materials submitted by either side,” he told us. “The question is whether the city had informed the public of the intention for those strips — that was the judges’ questioning. The judges’ question was, ‘Who was the public?’ They were very aggressive in their questioning. They seemed even-handed.” Arguing for the community lawsuit was attorney Caitlin Halligan of Gibson Dunn. “We were very impressed by her performance,” Miller said, noting, “She has argued in that court before.” Meanwhile, making the case for N.Y.U. was Seth Waxman, a former solicitor general under President Bill Clinton. However, an attorney for the city spoke much longer on why the university’s four-building, nearly 2 million-square-foot project should be allowed to proceed. N.Y.U. is called “a necessary party to the lawsuit,” which charges that the city illegally approved the project without the state Legislature ever having voted on whether to formally “alienate” the strips of affected parkland along Mercer St. and LaGuardia Place. The case will surely be precedent setting and have wide ramifications for parks throughout New York State — and, in fact, across the entire country — the N.Y.U. project opponents say. As for when the seven-member judges panel will render their fateful decision, which will forever impact the future of historic, low-scale, world-renowned, irreplaceable Greenwich Village (no pressure, guys!) Miller said it could be as early as next month. However, the court breaks during August, so the decision could come in the fall, he added.
Ray’s ‘new heart’: He’s been a virtual iron man, toiling on the overnight shift, while dispensing hot dogs and wry wit, at his Ray’s Candy Store on Avenue A for decades. But earlier this week, Ray Alvarez, 82, went to the hospital with chest pains and labored breathing, and on Tuesday, he had heart-valve replacement surgery at Beth Israel. “He had felt weak for sometime,” said Matt Rosen, who has been a big help to the East Village egg cream maestro in recent years. It was a great relief, he said, to hear that the surgery went O.K. for Ray, real name Asghar Ghahraman. “The procedure was a success,” Rosen said. “His upstairs neighbor saw him in recovery. His doctor was very pleased. Ray should be in the hospital for a few days, and then he faces a several months-long recovery. A number of us are working on getting his apartment outfitted for his recuperation. He was in good spirits all weekend leading up to the surgery. He was excited about his ‘new heart.’ I told him with a new heart, he can stick around another 82 years. He still has a long slog ahead, but this was an important step.” Once he has recuperated, will Ray be back behind the counter and keep pulling those gruelling hours? “Not sure about the night shift for the time being,” Rosen said. “We all thought about it, but it took a backseat to the more pressing issue of the surgery and his immediate recovery. He has some people at the shop taking care of things, but his health is obviously the most important thing.” Needless to say, it would be more than hard for Ray to give up working at his beloved Belgian fries and beignets mecca, where he famously churned out “Obama fries” after Barack Obama’s first election. “The store is his world, yes, so we’ll see,” Rosen said. “One day at a time for now.”
Like Kiss without makeup: As many readers know by now, the man behind the popular East Village blog EV Grieve recently revealed his identity — right before a reporter for Bedford + Bowery was about to out the staunchly anonymous blogger. His name is John Elsasser. An Ohio native, 49, he edited both his high school and Ohio State University newspapers, then did a stint working as a local reporter. Elsasser has lived in the East Village since 1994 when he moved to New York. He launched Grieve in 2007 as blogging was starting to blow up. His day job since ’94, the B + B writer, Elizabeth Flock, reported is as editor in chief of The Strategist, a magazine of the Public Relations Society of America. In a letter from the editor that Elsasser posted on Sunday, a day before Flock’s piece went live, he said he works for “a nonprofit,” which, in fact, the P.R.S.A. is. In his letter, Elsasser said he had been thinking of revealing his name for the past several years, but dragged his feet. In his defense, he said, Grieve isn’t a personal blog but a neighborhood blog. At any rate — as clearly can be seen from the myriad angry posts on her article — many of his followers are furious at Flock’s forcing his hand and making him reveal who he is — and possibly “flocking up” the blog’s future. What’s next for Grieve remains to be seen. “I’ve always loved this neighborhood, for better or worse, and I probably always will,” Elsasser wrote in his letter. “That sounds corny, but it’s true. That drives me more than anything. I’m not sure really what’s next for the site. We’ll see how this goes.” He later added, “[Updated: I’m not planning on shutting down the site right this moment … I’ll keep posting for the time being…].” (Makes us think of another Midwesterner who also became a legendary East Village blogger: the late Bob Arihood of Neither More Nor Less.)
Sixth Ave. situation: By getting police to crack down on enforcing the byzantine rules on sidewalk vending, the Village Alliance business improvement district finally managed to move the book vendors off of Sixth Ave. south of Eighth St. “Four years ago when we started,” William Kelley, the BID’s executive director told us, “the vendors had taken over the east side of Sixth Ave. for two solid blocks. They were selling not only books, but both legal and illegal merchandise, and were also not following city vending laws. We had complaints from local merchants as well as residents that they did not feel safe walking along this stretch of Sixth Ave., and that it was impacting the local retail economy. Since that time we have worked with the Sixth Precinct to enforce existing laws consistently.” The arcane regs include one table per vendor, legal merchandise only, no vending in tree pits, no vending from the ground, no vending against buildings, no vending within 20 feet of business or residential doorways and no vending at bus stops. When we walked by the other night, a guy sitting in a lawnchair set up by the curb was trying to sell a man a bunch of flowers. “Just giving me a dollar for it!” he haggled with the buyer. It’s not clear if “vending flowers from a lawn chair” is covered in the regulations, but with all those other rules, he was probably violating at least one of them. “It was never our intention to eliminate all vending, but simply to have vendors follow the law and operate in an orderly manner,” Kelley explained. “Book vendors do still operate on occasion near the old Barnes & Noble, one of the only spots where it is legal to vend. Neighbors feel much safer in the immediate environs around the subway station entrance, and merchants have also been happy with the way things are now.” The reason they can vend outside the former B & N is because it has a long stretch without doors, Kelley said. But what is currently really getting his goat is the broken glass in two doors, namely the ones of that same former B & N, whose space was taken over by a bank. “TD Bank has let fester those two shattered front doors since December 2014,” Kelley said. “They refuse to fix them, despite repeated requests. Not to mention they have had a lease for almost two years and done nothing to move forward on tenanting the property. It just adds to the general sense of decline in the area, even though so much has changed for the better on Eighth St.” When we passed by the other night, those doors were indeed even more cracked up than the last time we looked at them. At what point, you have to wonder, will the glass start to fall out of the doors and really injure someone badly? C’mon, TD Bank, fix those doors! And, while you’re at it, do something with that property!
