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. Within the East Village there are several smaller neighborhoods, including Alphabet City and The Bowery.
The neighborhood was once considered part of the Lower East Side, but in the 1960s it began to develop its own culture and became known as the East Village. Scores of artists and hippies began to move into the area, attracted by the base of Beatniks that had lived there since the 1950s. It has been the site of counterculture, protests and riots. The neighborhood is known as the birthplace and historical home of many artistic movements, including punk rock and the Nuyorican literary movement.
It is still known for a diverse community, vibrant nightlife and artistic sensibility, although in recent decades gentrification has changed the character of the neighborhood.
History
Formation of the neighborhood
Today's East Village was originally a farm owned by Dutch Governor Wouter van Twiller. Petrus Stuyvesant received the deed to this farm in 1651, and his family held on to the land for over seven generations, until a descendant began selling off parcels of the property in the early 1800s. Wealthy townhouses dotted the dirt roads for a few decades until the great Irish and German immigration of the 1840s and 1850s.
Speculative land owners began building multi unit dwellings on lots meant for single family homes, and began renting out rooms and apartments to the growing working class. The "East Village" was formerly known as Klein Deutschland ("Little Germany, Manhattan"); however, Little Germany dissolved after the SS General Slocum burned into the water in New York's East River on June 15, 1904. From the years roughly between the 1850s and the first decade of the 20th century, the "East Village" hosted the largest urban populations of Germans outside of Vienna and Berlin. It was America's first foreign language neighborhood; hundreds of political, social, sports and recreational clubs were set up during this period, some of these buildings still exist.
What is now the East Village once ended at the East River where Avenue C is now located. A large portion of the neighborhood was formed by landfill, including World War II debris and rubble from London, which was shipped across the Atlantic to provide foundation for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive.
The 'East Village' separates from the Lower East Side
Definitions vary, but the boundaries are roughly defined as east of the Bowery from 14th Street down to Houston Street.
Until the mid-1960s, this area was simply the northern part of the Lower East Side, with a similar culture of immigrant, working class life. In the 1950s the migration of Beatniks into the neighborhood later attracted hippies, musicians and artists well into 1960s. The area was dubbed the "East Village", to dissociate it from the image of slums evoked by the Lower East Side. According to the New York Times , a 1964 guide called, "Earl Wilson's New York," wrote that "artists, poets and promoters of coffeehouses from Greenwich Village are trying to remelt the neighborhood under the high-sounding name of 'East Village.'"
Newcomers and real estate brokers popularized the East Village name, and the term was adopted by the popular media by the mid-1960s. In 1966 a psychedelic weekly newspaper, The East Village Other , appeared and The New York Times declared that the neighborhood "had come to be known" as the East Village in the June 5, 1967 edition.
The music scene develops
In 1966 Andy Warhol promoted a series of shows, entitled The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and featuring the music of the Velvet Underground, in a Polish ballroom on St Marks Place. On June 27, 1967 the The Electric Circus opened in the same space with a benefit for the Children's Recreation Foundation (Chairman: Bobby Kennedy). The Grateful Dead, The Chambers Brothers, Sly & the Family Stone, the Allman Brothers were among the many rock bands that performed there before it closed in 1971.
On March 8, 1968 Bill Graham opened the Fillmore East in a Yiddish Theatre on 2nd Avenue. The venue quickly became known as "The Church of Rock and Roll," with two-show concerts several nights a week. While booking many of the same bands that had played the Electric Circus, Graham particularly used the venue - and its West Coast counterpart, to establish new British bands like The Who, Pink Floyd, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, and Led Zeppelin. It too closed in 1971.
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 Manhattan were: Patti Smith, Arto Lindsay, the Ramones, Blondie, Madonna, Talking Heads, the Plasmatics, Glenn Danzig, Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, Anthrax, and The Strokes. From 1983 - 1993, much of the more radical audio work was preserved as part of the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine recording project, which was based in the nearby Lower East Side.
Rise in artistic prominence
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 been the birthplace 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 and the community of experimental musicians, composers and improvisers now loosely known as the Downtown Scene.
Club 57, on St. Mark's Place, was an important incubator for performance art and visual art in the late 1970s and early 1980s; followed by Now Gallery, 8BC and ABC No Rio.
During the 1980s the East Village art gallery scene helped to galvanize a new post-modern art in America; showing such artists as Kiki Smith, Peter Halley, Keith Haring, Stephen Lack, Greer Lankton, Joseph Nechvatal, Nan Goldin, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Wojnarowicz and Jeff Koons.
The musical 'Rent'
The East Village is the setting for Jonathan Larson's musical Rent ; set in the early 1990s, the story chronicles a group of friends over a year in their struggles against poverty, drug abuse and AIDS.
The musical Rent chronicled a period in the neighborhood's history that is bygone. It opened at the New York Theater Workshop in February 1996. It described a New York City devastated by the AIDS epidemic, drugs and high crime, and followed several characters in the backdrop of their effort to make livings as artists.
Decline of the art scene
The East Village's performance and art scene has declined since its hey-day of the 1970s and 1980s. One club that had opened to try to resurrect the neighborhood's past artistic prominence was Mo Pitkins' House of Satisfaction, part-owned by Jimmy Fallon of Saturday Night Live . It closed its doors in 2007, and was seen by many as another sign of the continued decline of the East Village performance and art scene, which has mostly moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Rapture Cafe also shut down in April 2008, and the neighborhood lost an important performance space and gathering ground for the gay community. There are still some performance spaces, such as Sidewalk Cafe on Avenue A, where downtown acts find space to exhibit their talent, and the poetry clubs.
Punk scene icons stayed in the neighborhood as it changed. Richard Hell lives in the same apartment he has lived in since the 1970s, and Handsome Dick Manitoba of The Dictators owns and reigns over Manitoba's bar on Avenue B.
Internal neighborhoods
The East Village contains several hamlets of vibrant communities within itself.
Alphabet City
Main article: Alphabet City, Manhattan...
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