New York Today: A Real-Life Cartoon Coffee Shop

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/nyregion/new-york-today-lower-east-side-kabisera-kape.html

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Good morning on this radiant Tuesday.

If ever there were décor to match this week’s weather, it’s at Kabisera Kape on the Lower East Side.

The new coffee shop at 151 Allen Street — a hole-in-the-wall smaller than a subway car — is covered top to bottom with pop art so cheery and so gaudy that it seems less like a New York City storefront and more like a psychedelic Amsterdam cafe.

Step inside for your morning fix and you’re met by a laughing sun, smiling mushrooms, flowers with faces and energetic coffee beans — some meditating and bathing, others flying with angel or butterfly wings. In place of the acoustic guitar soundtrack you’d find at a Starbucks, you hear chirping birds.

“It’s like visual Prozac,” said the artist Peter Marco, who, over his 30 years on the Lower East Side, has become known to neighbors simply as Marco.

“The style is very simplistic, very cartoony — a baby could draw it — but it’s all about the message,” he told us. “With this place, it’s about looking into yourself and realizing your own potential, which you could probably figure out just by reading the walls.”

(Among the inscriptions: “To know where we are going, we must know where we’ve bean.”)

Marco was working a local construction job in the 1980s when he noticed artists selling their paintings along a fence by Prince and Greene Streets in SoHo. Then a 21-year-old whose tiny Clinton Street apartment doubled as an amateur art studio, Marco carried one of his pieces to the fence, attached it with some clothespins, sold it for $150, and has been painting on the Lower East Side ever since.

The neighborhood remains his favorite gallery in the city.

“As someone who’s from Manhattan, I’ve seen this place change a lot,” Marco said, noting the city’s dangers (and that he was robbed many times) in the 1970s. “Talk about change: You now have bike lanes and people playing with their laptops, having cappuccinos. Given that massive change, the Lower East Side hasn’t changed at all; it was immune to Giuliani and Bloomberg’s beautification. It’s still pretty raw. And that’s why I’m still here.”

Today, Marco, 50, lives above the coffee shop with his wife, Jeanette, 43, who is from the Philippines and moved to New York City three years ago. Their apartment is an artistic extension of the cafe.

No matter the weather or time of day in New York City, a sun shines over their living room, running the length of the ceiling. The walls are covered with blue sky and clouds, and living in this perfect world are octopuses with mustaches, flying pigs and other googly-eyed, giggling critters.

“In our bedroom we have our moon, the sky and the stars,” Ms. Marco said. “It makes me really happy waking up in the morning.”

“You can’t not feel good in that kind of environment,” Marco added. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

Here’s what else is happening:

The sunny streak continues.

Blue skies, a light breeze and a high around 70 today, with things heating up even more tomorrow.

(Here’s your allergy forecast.)

Now out you go.

• New York’s attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, resigned last night, hours after four women came forward accusing him of physical abuse. [New York Times]

• Westminster Choir College, in Princeton, N.J., has trained opera singers, choral directors and music teachers, but now it has been put up for sale. [New York Times]

• Cynthia Nixon released a video challenging Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to a televised one-on-one debate. [New York Times]

• Nearly a year ago, the police officer Dalsh Veve was injured so badly his family didn’t know whether he would live or die. On Monday, his wife escorted him home. [New York Times]

• Edward D. Mullins, the outspoken head of the union representing sergeants with the Police Department, demanded an apology after sending a harsh tweet criticizing unlawful searches and seizures. [New York Times]

• A man who fatally stabbed his girlfriend during a drug-fueled rage was convicted of manslaughter, but acquitted of the top charge of murder. [New York Times]

• An order of 300 new subway cars should have arrived by January 2017. Instead, only 32 of those cars are now on the tracks. The order is two years behind schedule. [New York Times]

• Edwin G. Burrows, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Brooklyn College professor who co-wrote “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898,” has died. He was 74. [New York Times]

• El Chapo’s lawyer asked the judge handling his client’s case to move the trial out of Brooklyn, in hopes of avoiding a spectacle. [New York Times]

• A study shows that 99 percent of New York City dwellers are within a 10-minute walk of a park — a much higher number than the national average of 54 percent. [Patch]

• JetBlue will deliver Patsy’s Pizzeria of East Harlem to Los Angeles for less than $20 through May 11. [Michigan Live]

• City Council members toured a Nycha development in Brooklyn for a firsthand look at the problems public housing residents have been living with. [ABC 7]

• The subway’s roots began with a project by the inventor Alfred Beach, who created a 300-foot tunnel and used a ventilation fan to power a 22-passenger train during the mid-1860s. [Connecticut Post]

• Today’s Metropolitan Diary: “Looking for the Q48”

• For a global look at what’s happening, see Your Morning Briefing.

• “‘The Chelsea Girls’ Exploded” exhibition, featuring premieres of Andy Warhol films and never-before-seen material, at the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown. Times and prices vary.

• The Masters of Social Gastronomy host “Strange Meat,” a discussion on unusual meat preparations, at the Institute of Culinary Education in Battery Park. 6:30 p.m. [$15]

• “Cool Tokyo: Harajuku, Akihabara and Beyond,” a talk on Tokyo’s fashion, food and culture with the artists Sebastian Masuda and Abby Denson, at the Japan Society in Midtown. 6:30 p.m. [$14]

• The Amateur Astronomers Association of New York leads an evening stroll and stargazing session along the High Line, by 14th Street in Manhattan. 6:45 p.m. [Free]

• Looking ahead: On May 14, TimesTalks hosts an evening with Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist protest punk rock group, on the Upper East Side. [Tickets]

• Yankees host Red Sox, 7:05 p.m. (YES). Mets at Reds, 7:10 p.m. (SNY).

• Alternate-side parking remains in effect until Thursday.

• For more events, see The New York Times’s Arts & Entertainment guide.

It’s on.

The annual Greenest Block in Brooklyn contest, presented by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the borough president Eric L. Adams, is accepting submissions until June 1.

Last year’s champion, Stuyvesant Avenue between Bainbridge and Chauncey Streets, was packed with blooms in every color of the rainbow — red garden verbena plants, yellow petunias, green Virginia creeper vines, blue edging lobelia and purple million bells.

Among the titles up for grabs are best residential block, best window box, greenest storefront and best street tree beds. When selecting the winners, judges will look at neighbor participation, creativity and visual effect, soil and tree stewardship, horticultural maintenance and plant variety, among other criteria.

Interested in participating? You can enter here, or sign up to attend a free “How to Green Your Block” workshop at the botanic garden.

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