October 15, 2006
East Village
For ‘One of the Last Buffaloes,’ It’s Time to Roam
By JAKE MOONEY
...But most of what has made Mr. Leggieri an East Village fixture — a status derived in large part from his role as an editor and owner of The East Village Other, one of the city’s more memorable underground newspapers — was gone, packed and shipped away.
Mr. Leggieri, 64, is moving out in the face of a 50 percent rent increase, just the latest, on an old storefront he moved into in 1990 when times were bad and the rent was low. Friends and neighbors collected about 150 signatures on a petition imploring the city, which sold the building to the current landlord, to intervene. But with a move-out deadline of this weekend, Mr. Leggieri was getting ready to close.
“I’m just one of the last buffaloes of a giant herd of buffaloes that used to be here, and those are the artists,” he said last week after a long day of cleaning.