The man behind EV Grieve is finally out and about in the East Village.
“Hello, my name is John Elsasser,” he posted last night, “and I have been running this website for the past eight years or so.”
The blogger had remained anonymous during all that time, even as he was quoted in the New York Times as a neighborhood authority and even as his site racked up links and plaudits from countless other mainstream media outlets. (Last year the Village Voice named EV Grieve the city’s Best Local Website and praised it for “breaking news about the East Village and providing a forum for brutally honest commentary from its current and former denizens.”)
Elsasser wrote that he had long thought about revealing his name, but dragged his feet. “However,” he wrote, “it seems easier now to make this disclosure, helped in part that a news site has designs on publishing a ‘Who is EVG?’ article in the days/weeks ahead.”’
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About Elizabeth Flock
Posts by Elizabeth Flock:
Nirbhaya Takes On Rape: ‘The Gift of This Play Is That It’s Not Fucking Palatable’
(Photo: Sinbad Phugra)
On its face, Nirbhaya, which had its American premier at the Lynn Redgrave Theater in the East Village last night, is about the 2012 gang rape of a 23-year-old student in New Delhi. Jyoti Singh Pandey, who was coming home with a friend from the movies, was brutally raped and beaten with an iron rod by six men aboard a bus, then left naked, for dead, by the side of the road. She died days later from internal injuries. The incident spurred angry protests across India, and a documentary about Jyoti’s assault, India’s Daughter, was released earlier this year, banned by an Indian court, and then watched by thousands.
A Wine Bar and a San Loco Are Opening in Williamsburg’s Marbleworks Lofts
The finishing touches are being put on Sort Of wine bar. (Photo: Elizabeth Flock)
A former marble factory on the corner of Metropolitan and Driggs is about to get a biodynamic wine bar, a new location of San Loco and a massive urgent care center.
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Williamsburg Watch Group Members Arrested in Vigilante Gang Beating
Five members of the Williamsburg Safety Patrol Unit, a neighborhood watch group also known as Shomrim, have been charged in the gang assault of Fort Greene resident Taj Patterson, whom they thought was a vandal.
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Brooklyn Borough President Aims to Crack Down On Scuzzy Landlords
A piece from “The Real Estate Show”
In a conversation with reporters today, Adams announced a new initiative to go after landlords who try to force out longtime tenants through harassment, unfairly raising rents, or failing to provide basic services. Adams said he had met with Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson on Tuesday to discuss how they could better prosecute those “who are abusing housing laws” and “doing it with impunity,” including in Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Bushwick.
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This Is The End: A Bushwick Label That’s Become a Destination For ’90s Acts
Boxes of CDs inside The End warehouse. (Photo: Elizabeth Flock)
When Nina Persson of the Cardigans signed with Bushwick-based indie label The End Records, she joined a handful of other established indie artists who had already eschewed big labels for The End, including the Dandy Warhols, the Lemonheads, Juliette Lewis and Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes. Alt-rock trio Better Than Ezra, playing a show at Irving Plaza tonight, also signed with The End last month.
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Clayton Patterson Had a Farewell Show: Is It Really Goodbye For the LES Legend?
Word that Clayton Patterson was leaving the Lower East Side for Austria really rattled those who considered him the neighborhood’s “last bohemian,” as the Times headline dubbed him. Could the man who documented the Tompkins Square Park riots and the underground scenes of the ’80s and ’90s East Village, founded a gallery of “outlaw art,” and edited epic histories of LES radicalism, filmmaking and Jewish culture really be leaving the hood whose denizens he’s photographed religiously? We, for one, had to find out.
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Bowery Mission Residents Will See Their Art in New Museum, a Couple Doors Down
“Draftsmen’s Congress,” a collective painting currently on display. (Photo courtesy New Museum, New York. Photo: Benoit Pailley)
Andres Serrano isn’t the only artist to have recently worked with homeless New Yorkers. Polish sculptor Pawel Althamer, whose running New Museum show “The Neighbors” includes three floors of his own work and one floor for visitors and community groups to paint, draw and tag themselves, now has some new collaborators: residents of the Bowery Mission, a homeless shelter a couple of doors down from the museum.
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Andres Serrano’s Portraits of Homeless New Yorkers Will Live On the Streets
Andres Serrano, the photographer and artist best known for his controversial 1987 photograph, “Piss Christ,” has turned his attention to the homeless of New York City in a new public art project on display around Washington Square Park next month.
Opening May 19, “Residents of New York” will include portraits of 35 homeless people, and will be on display at the West 4th Street subway station, the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, LaGuardia Place in Greenwich Village, and on public phone booths.
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The Commodore’s Stephen Tanner Will Open El Dorado in Bushwick
Tanner’s fried chicken at The Commodore. (Photo: Grub Street)
As Pies ‘n’ Thighs readies its Lower East Side location, one of its founders, Southern-grub virtuoso Stephen Tanner, is making moves of his own.
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