In some sincerely nauseating news from this weekend, gay singer Kevin Aviance was violently beaten late Friday night (or very early Saturday morning, if you prefer) on his way home in the East Village. Four men, ranging in ages from 16 to 20, have been arrested in connection to the incident and charged with first-degree assault as a hate crime.
This just arrived in our inbox — it was shot at Kim's Underground on St. Mark's — with the subject line "Mislabeling."
So we're sitting in a Dunkin Donuts on Second Avenue, having just checked the front window of the Second Avenue Deli ourselves, when we see Eater has beaten us to the punch. The above sign, affixed to the beloved and bygone deli is worrisome, sure. But we also agree with our foodie friends' assessment: It's clearly a hoax.
Jack Lebewohl's workmen didn't cart off every last bit of Second Avenue Delitritus last week. One last relic remains: This Deli-logo'd garbage can. Streetwalking photog Bucky Turco sends along the above image and reports that the thing is a hell of a lot harder to remove than you'd think. But if you show up with a crew of stout-hearted men, we're sure you can finagle it.
When news broke in the Times last week that the Second Avenue Deli was shuttered, at least temporarily and perhaps more permanently, in a rent dispute, it seemed partially tragic but also partially perhaps just a particularly intense game of real-estate chicken between the hondlers who own the deli and the hondlers who own the building. The latter option seemed increasingly likely when the second-day story revealed that the rent increase sought by the building's new owners was in fact built into the existing lease, negotiated 15 years ago.
Like drinking? (Of course you do.) Like the East Village? (Can't imagine why you wouldn't.) Have a spare $670,000 lying around? (Aha. You knew there was something.) If you answered yes to these three questions, then have we got an eBay auction for you.
Silly us; we always thought "travel" entails actually, you know, traveling somewhere.
The image at right is not the cast of Misshapes: The Musical! These are actually fresh faces behind the East Village's beloved crusties, a group of street kids who regularly sleep on beds of needles in Tomkins Square park. An ambiguous family of homeless punk anarchists (or young bums, as one might say), the crusties have recently come under scrutiny in light of the EDGY spate of heroin overdoses to plague the East Village and Lower East Side as of late, most recently the death of a young man in the bathroom at the Odessa diner. The Villager hits the street for some reportage:
This week's New York reports that East Village patron princess Rosario Dawson is leaving New York in favor of the West Coast, where the actress will live with remarkably hunky boyfriend Jason Lewis and their overgrown dogs. Given her lead role in Christopher Columbus' adaptation of Rent, Dawson's departure is at a particularly intense time:
