East Village, Manhattan

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Looking south from 7th Street down Second Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares through the East Village.

The East Village is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. It lies east of Greenwich Village, south of Gramercy and Stuyvesant Town, and north of the Lower East Side. The East Village encompasses the neighborhood of Alphabet City (Avenues A - D). The neighborhood is bounded by 14th Street on the north, Avenue D on the east, Houston Street on the south, and the Bowery and 3rd Avenue on the west.^[1]

1 Genesis of the name
2 Tompkins Square Park Police Riot
3 Culture
4 Notable residents
5 References
6 See also
7 External links

Until the mid-1960s, the eastern side of Manhattan between 14th and Houston streets was simply the northern part of the Lower East Side, and shared much of its immigrant, working class characteristics with the area below Houston Street. A shift began in the 1950s with the migration of Beatniks into the neighborhood, and then hippies, musicians and artists in the 1960s. The area was dubbed the "East Village", to dissociate it from the image of slums evoked by the Lower East Side name, and to present the area as the new Greenwich Village, which had been popular with artists, but had become middle-class by then.

Newcomers and real estate brokers popularized the East Village name, and the term was adopted by the popular media by the mid-60s. As the East Village developed a culture distinct from the rest of the Lower East Side, the two areas came to be seen as two separate neighborhoods rather than the former being part of the latter.^[2]^[3]

Main article: Tompkins Square Park Police Riot

Allen Ginsberg (left) with his lifelong companion, poet Peter Orlovsky

In August 1988, the Tompkins Square Park Police Riot erupted when police attempted to enforce a newly-passed curfew for the park.

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Other than geography, the East Village's most notable commonalities with Greenwich Village are a colorful history, vibrant social and cultural outlets, and street names that often diverge from the norm. Some notable examples are the Bowery, a north-south avenue which also lends its name to the somewhat overlapping neighborhood of the Bowery; St. Mark's Place, a crosstown street well-known for counterculture businesses; and Astor Place/Cooper Square, home of the Public Theater and the Cooper Union. Nearby universities like New York University (NYU) and The New School have dormitories in the neighborhood.

CBGB, the nightclub considered by some to be the birthplace of punk music, was located in the neighborhood, as was the early punk standby A7. No Wave and New York hardcore also emerged in the area’s clubs. Among the many important bands and singers who got their start at these clubs and other venues in downtown New York were: the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Arto Lindsay, the Ramones, Blondie, Madonna, Talking Heads, the Plasmatics, Glenn Danzig, Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, Anthrax, and The Strokes.

Over the last 100 years, the East Village/Lower East Side neighborhood has been considered one of the strongest contributors to American arts and culture in New York. During the great wave of immigration (Germans, Ukrainians, Polish) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, countless families found their new homes in this area. The East Village has also been the home of cultural icons and movements from the American gangster to the Warhol Superstars, folk music to punk rock, anti-folk to hip-hop, advanced education to organized activism, experimental theater to the Beat Generation. Club 57, on St. Mark's Place, was an important incubator for performance and visual art in the late 1970s and early 1980s, followed by 8BC as, during the 1980s, the East Village art gallery scene helped to galvanize modern art in America, with such artists as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons exhibiting. The East Village is also the setting for Jonathan Larson's musical Rent, which is set in the early 1990s and follows a group of friends as they spend a year struggling against AIDS, poverty, and drug abuse.

Though parts of this culture remain, many artists have relocated to Brooklyn in response to the rising prices and homogeneity that have followed the neighborhood's gentrification.

Today, the East Village, especially St. Mark's Place is notably a home to Japanese street culture and expatriates.

A view of Avenue A from Tompkins Square Park

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), Beat Generation poet and author of Howl.^[4]
Natalie Portman, actress
Keith Haring, pop artist
Jean-Michel Basquiat, graffiti artist
Tseng Kwong Chi, photographer

^ Kugel, Seth, "An 80-Block Slice of City Life", The New York Times, September 19, 2007.
^ Mele, Christopher; Kurt Reymers, Daniel Webb. Selling the Lower East Side - Geography Page. Selling the Lower East Side. Retrieved on 2007-01-17.
^ Mele, Christopher; Kurt Reymers, Daniel Webb. The 1960s Counterculture and the Invention of the "East Village". Selling the Lower East Side. Retrieved on 2007-01-17.
^ Hampton, Wilborn. "Allen Ginsberg, Master Poet Of Beat Generation, Dies at 70", The New York Times, April 6, 1997. Accessed December 4, 2007. "Allen Ginsberg, the poet laureate of the Beat Generation whose Howl! became a manifesto for the sexual revolution and a cause celebre for free speech in the 1950's, eventually earning its author a place in America's literary pantheon, died early yesterday. He was 70 and lived in the East Village, in Manhattan."