Al Amateau retires, p. 4
Volume 2, Number 48 FREE
East and West Village, Lower East Side, Soho, Noho, Little Italy and Chinatown
August 16 - 29, 2012
A bottle of squat: Beer tries to tap spirit of Blockos BY LINCOLN ANDERSON “Busch beer. Head for the mountains.” “Tastes great. Less filling.” No doubt, there have been a lot of catchy beer ad slogans over the years. How about this one? “Crack open an abandoned building — crack open a frosty cold Doss Blockos.” Hey, it could work — but it’s just a suggestion of
Photo by Amy Starecheski
Mosaic master is the key piece Jim Power, the East Village’s “Mosaic Man,” right, stopped by MoRUS on Saturday to help them apply the grout to their new mosaic sign. See Page 14.
Hot stuff! Park benches are unfit to sit, as they hit 125 °F BY LINCOLN ANDERSON Talk about being on the hot seat! On hot, sunny, summer days, the dark granite benches in Washington Square Park reach bun-blistering temperatures. The classy-looking benches, which ring the famed fountain plaza, were added under the park’s recent hotly debated renovation. And “hot” is definitely the operative word where the new seating is concerned. The painfully evident fact is not lost on parkgoers, or their posteriors. On high-temperature days during midday, very few people can be seen sitting on the sections of these granite benches that are in direct
sunlight. Instead, parkgoers can be found clustered under the sections of the benches that are shaded by trees. Meanwhile, the park’s sandstone fountain and traditional wooden benches, when exposed to strong sunlight, don’t heat up excessively and parkgoers can be seen sitting on them during the hottest part of the day. On Monday, at 1:40 p.m., The East Villager took a reading with a thermometer on one of the granite benches and, on the “outdoor” scale, it registered a tush-torching 125 degrees Fahrenheit! It wasn’t even particularly hot outside, with the temperature at that time, according
to wunderground.com, being about 82 degrees. (A knowledgeable stock clerk at the Nuthouse 24-hour hardware store on E. 29th St. said the key to an accurate reading would be to put the thermometer’s bulb on the bench surface. Fortunately, the $7 indoor/ outdoor thermometer that was used had — for the “outdoor” reader — an external wire with a metal piece at its tip that could be placed directly onto the bench surface. The “indoor” reading, which measured the “ambient” temperature, was also very high, around 118 degrees Fahrenheit. Both
The East Villager. Yes, in what is probably a first, there is now a beer named after a former East Village squat. But it’s brewed in a place about as far away on this Earth as one could get from Alphabet City — Australia. The company that makes it is the East 9th Brewing Co., named after
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Chick-fil-A flap embroils N.Y.U.; Vote on fall menu BY GARY SHAPIRO A local food fight is causing a lot of squawking in the Village. The ruckus began when Dan Cathy, president of the Atlanta-based restaurant chain Chick-fil-A, criticized gay marriage. N.Y.U.’s Weinstein Residence Hall, which is currently closed for summer break, serves food from this company.
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5 1 5 C A N A L STREET • N YC 10013 • C OPYRIG H T © 2012 N YC COMMU NITY M ED IA , LLC
The Village location is the only Chick-fil-A franchise in the city. Hillary Dworkoski, a former student at N.Y.U.’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, caused a lot of clucking by circulating a petition at www.change.org, urging N.Y.U. to stop doing business with Chick-fil-A. City Council Speaker
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EDITORIAL, LETTERS PAGE 10
FRINGENYC IS FOREVER YOUNG PAGE 18