Costumed performers and tour guides are fighting for unionization at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where they work to recreate the squalid living conditions of turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants, the very group that was integral to 20th century unionization efforts. Dozens of the tenement employees protested last night outside a fundraiser for the museum at Chelsea Piers. Most of the guides work part time for an average $17 per hour, with no regular pay increases,......

Today the Times’s chief food critic Frank Bruni revisits WD-50 (pictured) and elevates the Lower East Side avant-garde restaurant to three stars (a 2003 Times review by another critic had awarded it two). Chef Wylie Dufresne has made WD-50 a destination with his experimental, transgressive menu, and Bruni concedes that in the past “too many of his creations were gratuitously perverse… many visitors understandably feel that what they’ve experienced isn’t so much a meal as......

Bronx-born writer Richard Price, famous for his gritty urban novels Clockers and Freedomland, as well screenplays like The Color of Money and award-winning episodes of The Wire, has now turned his eye for detail on the turbo-gentrifying Lower East Side. Lush Life, his first novel in five years, was described by Times critic Michiko Kakutani as “a visceral, heart-thumping portrait of New York City... no one writes better dialogue than Richard Price.” The story concerns......

The police are continuing to look for James Gonzalez, who is suspected of fatally stabbing his ex-girlfriend at a grocery store as well as stabbing her co-worker. The attack occurred Friday afternoon at the East Village Key Foods location. Gonzalez, 42, who had done some part-time work at the Key Foods where he met 24-year-old Tina Negron and dated her on-and-off for a year up until a few months ago, fled the store on foot.......

Images from WNBC and WABC The police are looking for a man suspected of stabbing two Key Food employees, one of whom died at a hospital two hours after the afternoon attack. Other employees at the East Village store say James Gonzalez, a part-time maintenance worker, stabbed ex-girlfriend Tina Negron with a 10-inch knife, because he was upset over their breakup. Negron had been in the elevated manager's booth when Gonzalez apparently attacked. Bookkeeper......

Photograph of a vacant lot on the Lower East Side by p0psharlow on Flickr Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a bicyclist struck on Queens Blvd. and 55th St. a smoke condition at the Heartland Brewery & Rotisserie At 350 5th Ave & East 34th St. Your name is Leila. You're a Verizon customer. You are receiving every text msg. addressed to Leila across the planet. A science teacher at a Staten Island H.S. along......

Sponge Bob! I am your father!, by dcschaub, at flickr Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a shooting on East 169th St. and Franklin Ave. in the Bronx, an aircraft emergency at Laguardia in Queens, and a power outage on Laconia Ave. in the Bronx. The suit about seizing private property for another private owner in the name of public gain will move to the Supreme Court after a 3-judge panel ruled that Bruce Ratner's......

Wouldn’t be caught dead with a “latte” from Starbucks or a Coolata from Dunkin Donuts? Well, you haven’t reached the summit of coffee snobbery until you’ve had the self-proclaimed “ultimate” cup of coffee, expertly prepared by computers and pneumatic tubes at the Lower East Side’s Roasting Plant. Since opening last spring, business has been hopping at the sleek Orchard Street café; coffee aficionados are drawn back as much for the fresh coffee as for......

FOOD: Those with a taste for expensive ham and the means to pay for it will be tantalized by tonight’s one-night-only 5 course tasting menu at Suba, a Spanish restaurant on the Lower East Side. Chef Seamus Mullen has obtained the prized “Rolls Royce of Ham” – Jamón Ibérico – and will be offering it tonight with Ossabaw Island hogs and Iberian wine. There are just a few seatings still available for tonight's event, which......

The Post is reporting about a disturbing crime: A woman who took a cab from the Lower East Side back home to Brooklyn says the yellow cab driver assaulted her. The victim, a 38-year-old real estate agent who lives in Park Slope, left a lounge at Rivington and Bowery around 4AM (the lounge's bouncer helped her hail the cab). The driver apparently asked her repeatedly to sit in the front passenger seat, which she declined.......

At the risk of turning this into a cheese sandwich blog, we pose the following question: What do you get when you take a grilled cheese, arguably the Platonic form of childhood comfort food, and let Anne Saxelby put her spin on it? A decidedly grown-up version known as the Grayson and B&B;'s Grilled Cheese. As soon as we heard about this new sandwich, Gothamist sped down to the Saxelby Cheesemongers. The first thing that......

This week's story about a 500-pound retired NYPD cop trying to get more dough (the green money kind) inspired The Late Show with David Letterman's Thursday night top ten list. Retired cop Paul Soto, who wears a 6-foot-long belt, has been receiving disability payments (equal to half his pay) as his narcolepsy, hypertension and morbid obesity prevented him from working his job. He boldly tried to prove that his disability was due to an......

Twice a year the Department of Sanitation sets up an electronic recycling event in each borough; in Autumn ’06 they collected 191 tons of electronics and 1,245 pounds of cell phones. It’s a step in the right direction, but for New Yorkers trying to save space in cramped apartments, these events are far too infrequent and inconvenient. So a huge amount of e-waste – 25,000 tons a year – ends up in landfills, where it......

It's been quite some time since we hopped the virtual F train to the virtual Lower East Side (that's VLES, for those in the know), but it seems one NY Times scribe has been making some frequent visits to the online world. In fact, he may even prefer it to its real life counterpart.There were no imperious bouncers or foul odors to contend with, and no fluids of any kind expectorated on my shoes. Except......

Mention the word Kuta to a surfer or a globetrotter and the first thing that comes to mind is the Balinese fishing village turned beach resort. The folks behind Kuta Satay House & Wine Bar are looking to get the same name recognition from diners with their new spot on the Lower East Side. With a menu that gives shoutouts to various Indonesian locales and a dining room decked out with Balinese masks, it's clear......

The Streit's Matzo company is leaving the Lower East Side location where it opened in 1925 and since occupied as a mainstay of a neighborhood of tenements and a sizable Jewish population. One can still walk down Rivington St. and peer through levered windows to see rotating metal racks where the company produces its unleavened bread. Aron Streit founded the matzoh company in 1914, revived it in 1923, and moved it into a red brick......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: an armed robbery on Washington Pl. and Broadway in Manhattan, a person under a train at 42nd St. and 8th Ave. in Manhattan, and a bomb threat at Utopia Ave. and 58th Ave. in Queens. A Chappaqua neighbor of Bill and Hillary Clinton was arrested for the murder of his wife. Last year, he claimed that a stranger burst into their SUV following an accident and shot her. There......

As the ones who first reported on the mysterious tall bench on the median of East Houston Street, we feel some responsibility in bringing closure to the story. (fYI amNY: Link.) Contrary to some of the comments in our original post claiming that the bench was just an amateurish photoshop gag, it turns out the surreal furniture was real, quite real. And now it is quite gone. We spoke to Ted Timbers at the DOT......

It’s a common gripe that pretty much everything that gives New York its flavor is being steadily eviscerated and replaced with corporate chains and exclusive amenities for the affluent, but this week has been a doozy. In the past two days, for starters, we’ve seen closures announced for the following joints:The classic, blue collar Donuts Coffee Shop on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope. The beloved unassuming LES coffee & bar oasis that was Lotus Lounge.......

Kuta Satay House & Wine Bar: Taking its name from the tourist beach town in Bali, Kuta Satay House (pictured) is bringing its modern Southeast Asia menu to the Lower East Side. The main attraction here are the skewers, such as short ribs with asian pears and sesame barbeque sauce. Entrees emphasize seafood and steak, but there’s also a spicy duck curry and side dishes like garlic fries. 65 Rivington St, (212) 777-5882. Le Royale:......

After commuters on the L and B/D (as well as N/Q/R/W) lines had to deal with breakdowns and commuting delays last night, this evening's commute brings delays on the F, D, G and N lines. Apparently a signal problem at 4th Avenue-9th Street Station in Brooklyn is causing the F to be shut between West 4th Street-Washington Square Station and the Church Avenue Station in both directions. The F then runs on the D......

Haru: The Japanese mini-chain’s takeover of New York is proceeding according to plan with the opening of their latest location in the financial district. The elegant, bi-level space (pictured) is located in the landmark 1903 Beaver Building, which calls to mind a mini-Flatiron Building. This location features two floors of dining to accommodate 160 guests, a 17 seat sushi bar, a second “alcohol” bar and two private party rooms. Like the other Harus, the extensive......

Today marks the grand opening of the Moscot Museum. You know Sol Moscot, the lens shop with giant yellow bespectacled signs that look over the streets of New York like Dr. Eckleburg's eyes? Apparently they're not much less symbolic -- sticking around New York for the past 100 years is no small feat, and must stand for something. But a museum, really?The Moscot Museum will showcase never before released, historic black & white photographs of......

Nicolai Ouroussoff, the architecture critic for the NY Times, enjoys working in his employer's new headquarters, he writes today, but the building designed by Renzo Piano falls short of the best skyscrapers in the city. For one, it allegedly harbors a streak of nostalgia, which in the world of architectural discourse amounts to an aesthetic identity crisis. The nostalgia in question is a longing not for neo-Gothic frills and cornices, but for the 1950s era......

The new trailer for Cloverfield (the JJ Abrams movie due out in January) has been released, and only proves a tad more revealing than the first. With a giant monster destroying New York City, this movie will certainly be for those who like "destruction porn," because nothing really beats the Statue of Liberty being decapitated... Abrams turned the Lower East Side into a war zone earlier this year, but he's been hush-hush about any details......

When you first thumb through the menu at Eat-pisode, the new Lower East Side Thai joint on Ludlow Street, you might cringe that the pages are numbered "Eat-pisode 1," "Eat-pisode 2," and so on, as though they are chapters into gastronomic revelation. Fortunately, all of the cringing stops there, and delectable food by the husband-wife team of Wara and Natalee Supulchai (also owners of Poh Tree Thai Spa across the street from the restaurant),......

AMNY ruined elitist drinkers’ fun today by outing some “secret” watering holes around town. One of them, The Back Room, is no secret, just a pain to find for first-timers. The capacious bar is tucked away at 102 Norfolk Street two doors down from a "Lower East Side Toys" sign; pass through a gate and down some steps to a narrow alley that leads to an unmarked door. Or just look for the bouncer standing......

A little follow-up to the story about the 80-year-old woman who was robbed of tens of thousands of dollars from her Lower East Side apartment. Earlier this month, Connie Nieves had let in two men posing as flower deliverymen (note to self: Delivery men rarely work in pairs when they only have one dozen roses), who then tied her up and ransacked her apartment of the cash. Nieves said, "How can I not open the......

An 80-year-old woman was robbed of $75,000 by two men posing as flower delivery guys more than a week ago. The two men fooled the Lower East Side woman into letting them into her apartment by telling her they had a floral delivery for her, showing her a dozen roses. They then bound her with tape and ransacked her apartment. Connie Nieves said the thieves made off with her and her husband's life savings. The......

Yesterday, the police arrested the personal assistant to "broker to the stars" Linda Stein in connection with Stein's October 30 murder. Stein, who had also managed the Ramones and later parlayed her connections to sell real estate to celebrities, had been found bludgeoned to death in her Fifth Avenue apartment by her daughter. The police revealed that assistant Natavia Lowery confessed to them that Stein's abuse pushed her over the edge. Police Commissioner Ray......