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The Paper of Record for Greenwich Village, East Village, Lower East Side, Soho, Union Square, Chinatown and Noho, Since 1933
December 10, 2015 • $1.00 Volume 85 • Number 28
Toledano tenants unite to fight eviction efforts in East Village buildings BY YANNIC RACK
T
enants in rent-regulated apartments in the East Village are fighting eviction by their new landlord, who is already a well-known figure in the neighborhood for allegedly harassing long-term renters into giving up their homes. As The Villager has pre-
viously reported, Raphael Toledano, who purchased more than a dozen properties in the area this year, hasn’t made the best of impressions on his new tenants, who have reported late-night phone calls and ominous visits by his associates that leave them feeling TOLEDANO continued on p. 4
After 50 years, famed fashionista Patricia Field closing Downtown store BY TINA BENITEZ-EVES
P
atricia Field is in a good place. Decked out in purple-sparkled arm warmers, shiny pink lace-up loafers and half-fatigued pants and crowned by flaming red hair, the 73-yearold designer — known for dressing Carrie Bradshaw and crew in “Sex and the
City” and the cast of “The Devil Wears Prada” as well as clothing rockers, actors, drag queens, writers, students, locals and everyone in between — will close her 4,000-squarefoot shop at 306 Bowery by this March or April. Field’s style is a punk rock orgy of shreds, leather, FIELD continued on p. 5
PHOTO BY MILO HESS
These kids were definitely feeling very bubbly in Union Square.
NYCHA will build on ‘hot’ East Side, chief assures BY LINCOLN ANDERSON
W
hen Mayor de Blasio appointed Shola Olatoye chairperson and C.E.O. of the New York Public Housing Authority in February 2014, he gave her two assignments: first, to “reset relationships with residents,” and, second, “to come up with a plan” to save North America’s largest public housing authority. With 607,000 residents, NYCHA’s population is larg-
er than Las Vegas, Atlanta or Miami. If it were a city, it would be the country’s 30th largest. One of every 14 New Yorkers lives in NYCHA housing. In an interview with the editorial staff of The Villager and NYC Community Media last Friday, Olatoye laid out some of the major features of that new 15-point plan, NextGeneration NYCHA, including, most notably, the authority’s intention to build new housing that is 50 percent affordable and 50
percent market rate on open land within existing NYCHA developments in “hot” neighborhoods. In September, the sites of the first two of these “50/50” so-called “infill” projects were announced — NYCHA’s Wyckoff Gardens in Boerum Hill / Gowanus, Brooklyn, and Holmes Towers on the Upper East Side, which would respectively see up to 650 and 400 new units built on their grounds NYCHA continued on p. 6
Grace Church’s ode to a Roman urn..............page 10 Luxury reaches new heights on L.E.S...........page 14 ‘Nutcracker’ is cracking good.......page 19
www.TheVillager.com