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......

Workers crammed into small spaces and contending with oppressive heat on the Lower East Side. Thank goodness for the labor movement of the early 20th Century. Or are the very people who commemorate those days enduring the same conditions? The Villager reports that workers at The Lower East Side Tenemant Museum are taking a page out of their own history books and forming a union. Their complaints include extreme temperatures and cramped workspaces. They want......

Every year that tragically hip (used to be Downtown) now-Midtown magazine, Paper, gives us a list of all the beautiful people. Some are famous, most you've never heard of, all of them are pretty on the inside (and/or outside!) and most importantly - they're all doing something cooler than you. Let's take a look at some of this years BPs: • Hayes Peebles is in there, the 14-year old wunderkind that played our last Movable......

We interviewed co-owner of Luna Lounge Rob Sacher in 2004, and he told a little story about Elliott Smith (who wrote his album XO at the bar at Luna). The story starts out, "Before I knew who Elliott Smith was, I knew him as this very quiet guy that had discovered the bar (at Luna) and would stay there till closing or near closing most nights, writing constantly in a journal with some kind of......

The Lower East Side soared into a new era of decadence this past fall with the opening of the trendy new restaurant Thor. You may remember from your 8th grade literature class that Thor is the Norse god of thunder. If any god reigns here, however, it's the god of bad design. Take first the name—it has no connection to mythology but instead is just an acronym for The Hotel on Rivington. It’s the first......

H & H Bagels and Junior's Cheesecake are usually the "no-brainer" stops for Gothamist's holiday gifts for transplanted New York foodies. This year, however, we thought that our gourmet buds in far-off lands like Maryland, Florida, Arizona and beyond would appreciate epicurean delights that focus on a well-loved culinary corner of our fair city: the Lower East Side. For example, a delivery of diet-busting potato, kasha, spinach and cabbage knishes from the Grande Dame of......

City Rag, lately reporting all sorts of downtown institution closings, has photographs of Meow Mix's now permanently closed doors. The Lower East Side lesbian bar shut down its East Houston Street venue due to too much tangling with the city (random fines and closing) and flooding, as well as the smoking ban, but its owners will announce their new space at the end of the month on their website. Look for Meow Mix to return......

The most famous metrophile* in recent memory, Darius McCollum, has struck again: He was found by police in the LIRR's rail yards in Jamaica, Queens, carrying various transit keys (engineer, universal, and switch), transit workers' clothes and a hard hat. The Post reports that McCollum had only been out of prison from serving ANOTHER transit-related offense for two months when this happened. The Lower East Side resident was "charged with attempted grand larceny, criminal impersonation,......

Harold Harmatz, who owned Ratner's on the Lower East Side, died last week. His obituary in the Times is especially rich, showing how Harmatz both ran a linchpin of LES dining that offered "onion rolls, blintzes and the restaurant's staff of famously no-nonsense waiters" 24 hours a day in the days before gentrification and led the fight to prevent Robert Moses from building an expressway over the Lower East Side that would connect Williamsburg Bridge......

School officials and parents are wondering why nineteen fifth graders at P.S. 177 in Bensonhurst came down with rashes on their necks. The school was quarantined for two hours, but the Department of Health didn't find any causes. Speculation that dust from school construction might be the culprit seems unlikely, since there were other rooms closer to the construction and students in those rooms did not develop the rash. Afflicted children were sent to hospitals,......

The New York Times takes apart the city's doggie census and analyzes it using animal ownership information to gain insights into New Yorkers. Reporter Susan Saulny notes the variations of dogs in different areas with much humor: "For instance, who would be most likely to own Lucy, a cute little Shih Tzu? (Hint: Lucy often wears her long hair in a high ponytail above her eyes, fastened with a little pink bow.) Thinking, thinking. Someone......