Also: lots of smiling locals, punks, crazies, glowing crosses, burning skulls, tinted skies, brick ruins erratically montaged to Alan Vega and Martin Rev — obviously, a far, far cry from the gentrified, scintillating condo lands of today’s there-abouts, where, apparently, Alphabet City doesn’t even exist anymore.

This, via Dangerous Minds:

In the seventies hundreds of buildings were abandoned, buildings with no heat, no hot water, no locks. The landlords had wrung all the money they could get out of them….Today [1984] whole blocks between Avenues A and D are lined with the carcasses of buildings. Vast stretches of land are covered with crumbled bricks and cement. Until recently, lines of drug buyers snaked around the blocks….When Father Moloney found a dead body near the Christadora Building last year, the police acted almost unconcerned. ‘We are in a no man’s land,’ he was told. ‘They can dump anything they want here.” New York magazine – May 28, 1984.

Cue Westerns score.

Ah, the red brick-speckled horizons, uninterrupted by plasticine condos… Ah, Tompkins Square Park, full of hip cats sans strollers… Ah, the piles of trash, symbolizing the now extinct affordable rents in a neighborhood full of yet unsterilized culture, a culture just getting ready to thrive and get all ’70s Bohemian… Oh, and everything’s a little more magical with a Joshua light show. Old timers say “ow?”

Last night, legendary hip hop group Smif-N-Wessun (and Pete Rock) held an album release party at Tammany Hall in the LES. When the show ended and crowds poured out onto Orchard Street, the NYPD struck and they struck hard.

Several videos of their brute force tactics was captured when officers weren’t strategically blinding the camera with their flashlights.

Here’re some randy artworks from the “Pornucopia” excess and porn-themed art show at the Allegra LaViola Gallery. Randy! Yet, it was the relatively tame nude pizza-face and happily-nippled skipping girl in the window display that caused vocal protesting from the adjacent Orthodox community, three visits from the police in the past two weeks and Yeshiva schoolboys banging on the glass.

It’s a delicate situation. The culture clash between the long-established Jewish Orthodox community and the newer art gallery scene seems unavoidable.

Obviously, if nipples and crotch-patches alone are intolerable, “disgusting” displays of “I don’t know what this world is becoming!” then the water-color strap-on sex-doll face-riding inside won’t be your fare, regardless of your spiritual persuasion. Don’t go in. But this is New York City. Let’s celebrate diversity. That includes a little porn art.

The show runs through Friday. “Pornucopia,” Group Show, Feb 4 – Mar 18, Allegra LaViola Gallery, NYC

A Chinese grocer in the Asiany section of the Lower East Side made good use of the heavy downfall, sculpting this massively rotund snowman. The ghetto ‘Frosty’ was outfitted with a garbage bag scarf, rotten clementine buttons, and a blackened carrot nose. (Photo: ANIMALNewYork)

While walking through the LES yesterday, I happened upon a woman who was calmly incensed over a parking ticket she was given and rightly so. As you can see, despite being payed up till 7:05PM, she was somehow slapped with a $60 ticket a little before 6:30PM for not displaying the Muni-meter receipt, an outrageous claim since it was sitting pretty on the dashboard of her Mercedes Benz. What could possibly explain the meter maid getting this so wrong? I have an extremely circumstantial theory, but will float it out there anyway: out of state plates.