A 25-year-old woman says she was drugged and raped at Lower East Side bar Happy Ending last Tuesday night by an employee who has since been fired. After spending 10 hours dealing with NYPD officers who, she says, kept suggesting she had “led him to believe it was okay,” she suffered additional indignity at the hands of Happy Ending itself: a spokesperson for the bar claimed CCTV showed “a 90 percent chance it was consensual behavior.”

This excruciating video of an impromptu dance party-turned-protest-turned-mass arrest on Manhattan's Lower East Side is a perfect reminder of why you should never leave the comfort of your own apartment, under any circumstances, especially on New Year's Eve.

Just 20 years after this charming neighborhood video tour directed by Bram van Splunteren and led by Iggy Pop, this particular version of New York is all but gone. (Via Metafilter/Gothamist.)

Way back before there was Lady Gaga, there was Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta and she lived in this apartment on Manhattan's Lower East Side. The entire premise of If These Walls Could Talk should be re-written so that it is about this place.

Yelp, the unqualified-schmoes-reviewing-restaurants site, has added "hipster" as an official category when describing an establishment's ambiance. It joins established selections such as romantic, trendy, intimate, casual, classy, and touristy.

Replicating their "Hipster Trap," artists Jeff Greenspan and Hunter Fine set a "Bridge and Tunnel Trap" with hair gel, bronzer, a gold chain, and PATH train tickets in front of a bar on the Lower East Side. Snooki beware!

Where is the dark black heart from which all things filthy and corrupt emanate to pollute the souls of our innocent children? Andrea Peyser has found it:

There was a time, historians say, when Manhattan's Lower East Side was home to a thriving community of wretched poor people. Now, their former tenements host only idle young yuppie layabouts such as yourself. Where shall the L.E.S.'s poor-helpers go?

The NYC Department of Health released a report yesterday, "Women, Unprotected Anal Sex and HIV Risk," that says women use condoms far less than men when doing butt-related naughty things. They polled women between the ages of 18 and 64.

For a man who wears pretty much exactly the same thing every single day—a high-collared white shirt, blazer, dark slacks, and a fat tie—the Grand Moff of the fashion world sure needs a lot of luggage. How much?

[Fashion chancellor Karl Lagerfeld is held aloft in a crane while shooting the new Chanel campaign on the Lower East Side. Image via Getty]

The low-rent Jimmy Lloyd Productions put ads on Craigslist to attract "REAL songwriters" to add "Realness" to their proposed Lower East Side reality show, The Scene. Don't waste a demo, this is an embarrassment, not a big break. [Getty]

Spencer Morgan's newest Profile of an Odd Man is good enough to make you throw up, because you can almost hear the crack bubbling in a fucked up corner of a too-cool subculture. Ugh. Crack.

If you are really familiar with what the fuck is up then you know that Aaron "A-Ron" Bondaroff is a downtown LES cool guy for hire, founder of the aNYthing brand, and generally, you know, the man with the brand that is downtown, and all that, once upon a time.

The Hotel on Rivington may not be the coolest hotel downtown, but you have to give them points for trying to keep up with the whole name-brand hotel clothing trend. THOR's management is giving every employee a pair of DC LIFE "dress sneakers," so their footwear matches "the scarlet carpeting of the hotel's dramatic entrance." Also: Not a bad way to keep up employee morale when you can't afford to give anyone a raise. [HC]

LES Hotel Saturation: A Map [Bowery Boogie]

Now that he has the Thompson LES to promote, hotelier Jason Pomeranc has all sorts of great things to say about the Lower East Side. In fact, "the Lower East Side is my favorite neighborhood in New York," he tells Fashion Week Daily. No word on whether that means he'd actually live there himself—his loft happens to be located in SoHo—although if he does decide to move and elects to stay at the Thompson LES while in transition, we'd recommend that he not use the hotel's WiFi. [Fashion Week Daily]

That tall building rising on Ludlow Street? That would be the Hotel Ludlow, which will be opening in early 2009 with 170 rooms, a restaurant, spa, and "exclusive rooftop lounge." Let the LES hotel wars begin! [Curbed]

The Lower East Side is changing! You blink once, and the neighborhood has gone from an immigrant-packed hovel of tenements to a rich jerk-packed hovel. Of condos! The National Trust for Historic Preservation has just named the entire freaking neighborhood one the nation's 11 most endangered places:

NYC blogger-about-town Cajun Boy was minding his business on a bench outside of an American Apparel store on the Lower East Side last weekend, when "a man with thick eyeglasses wearing a blue Member's Only jacket, carrying a denim murse, and generally carrying on like a crazy person" started pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, shouting into a headset. The man's erratic behavior had Cajun Boy convinced he was a maniac about to shoot up the store. Until he got a good look and discovered—spoiler alert—that it was just energetic American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, no doubt engaged in important corporate business! A scary, businesslike man. Not spotted: Dov's poor chihuahua. [Cajun Boy In The City]