The East Village Scene
An email from the Fellows Seminar
The mecca for the creative, the rebellious, the bohemian, the
East Village traces its historical roots with that of its mother area,
Greenwich Village. I went the East Village once this summer, lost in its
small streets with vendors in and out of doors, on a mission from my boss
to return a movie to Kim's Video on 8th and Christopher. I had come from
my dorm in the West Village.
The West was, like a fraternal culture twin, similar, but not
really, to the East.
Kenneth Jackson in his Encyclopedia of New York City defines the East:
"The East Village, from about 14th Street to Houston Street on the east
side of Manhattan, is the place to go for any tattoos, piercings, or
crazy hair colors you've been wanting for over half a century [it] has
been ground zero for bohemian and avant-garde culture in NYC"(2).
Meanwhile, Robert Heide and John Gilman in Greenwich Village describe the
West: "The West Village has become more stylish with jazz clubs and
sparkling new coffee shop emporiums opening all the time"(4). In my trip
to the East Village, I was safe and entranced but felt, in Gap khakis and a
white tee, kind of like a very sore thumb.
First, though, here is the history of both: of Greenwich Village.
After the Dutch bought Manhattan Island from the natives in 1626,
what we know as Greenwich Village was a woodland, soon to become a
prosperous tobacco plantation. In 1731 English warship commander Sir
Peter Warren purchased the plantation and built a large mansion on Perry
and West 4th Streets. In the 1750s and 60s the "Greenwich" area attracted
well-to-do families who built grand country-style homes. When smallpox
hit the still-distant New York City in 1822, families fled to the
Village, and the country village became a thriving town unto itself with
new banks and businesses and merchants who built grand townhouses around
Washington Square Park in the Village's center. By the end of the
century, though, wealthier residents started moving uptown to more
"fashionable areas" while their houses became run down and run by
absentee landlords. The low rent attracted artists, or, as Gilman and
Heide put it, "radical and intellectual rebels who saw the Village as an
adjunct to Paris"(2).
In the early 1900s the Village was the place to live "the free
life." It was, at one point or another, home to Edgar Allan Poe, Mark
Twain, Edith Wharton, Jackson Pollock, and visited by Hemingway and many
others. The Village became a symbol of the repudiation of traditional
values during World War I and in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s was considered
the tail-end of Bohemian life: "In the 1950s Beat poets and coffee house
existentialists intermingled with a new breed of intellectually oriented
rebel actors who studied the "Method" with Lee Strasberg at the Actor's
Studio"(2). In the 1970s, the furor of off-Broadway counter-culture and
angry coffee house poetry continued, though with new fuel: the
reverberations of the Stonewall Rebellion, the "sexual revolution,"
the
era of gay liberation and women's rights. The Village housed a strong
homosexual community, and became a rallying place for antiwar protesters
in the seventies and AIDs activists in the eighties.
The distinction of the East Village from the West is a rather
current phenomenon. By the 1980s, because of rising real estate costs and
Yuppie invasion, the artists who could indulge in the free experiences
and artistic experimentation could no longer afford to live in the city.
Still, many artists moved the East Village and Alphabet City, where a
storefront gallery movement in the 1980s seemed to nurture new artists. A
movement called East Village Expressionism from 1980-1987 further
clarified and reflected the East Village's soul of anarchy and
experimentation, defining it laundry-list style as "Alphabet City, punk
music, the discovery of the Vesuvuiana machine which produced espresso as
a volcano would, disco palaces, black spandex and nail polish, trips to
Italy, passion, weight-lifting, installying Robert Rauschenberg's
performance exhibit and wearing his plastic suit to the openingGraffitti,
German Expressionismurban squalor; culminating in an actual near death
experience"(Trudang 1).
Even in the 1990s, the original Bohemian atmosphere and
youth-culture so inherent in Greenwich Village life continued to shift
eastward to rock-clubs like the Pyramid, the Continental and C.B.G.B.'s
and towards East Village oddball shops like Little Ricky's and Atomic
Passion (4). Today, the East thrives too on small bookstores, inexpensive
thrift shops, restaurants, and Kim's Video, where if you asked about
Uncle Buck or Field of Dreams, well, the pierced man behind the counter
would tell you to look on a shelf, dusty, hidden practically, on the
third floor in the corner-if they were there at all. Most Village
chroniclers describe today's East as a haven for under thirty, Gen-X
types along with "rebellious get-back-at-your-parents skinheads, some
with shaved heads or others with purple or fuchsia dyed hair stiffed
straight-up into points with gel and hair spray who also sport nose,
eyebrow and cheek rings" (Gilman 4).
Often it helps too to define places or things by what they are not-and
the East Village is not a neighborhood like its West partner, or Soho,
Noho, Times Square, Broadway, or Lincoln Center. This past summer I lived
in the West Village at an NYU dorm a block away from Washington Square
Park. The West is more "stylish": little cafes and coffeehouses on
every
corner, classy wine houses, and jazz clubs to the south. Well-dressed
couples love weekend nights. A famous streetball court is a block down,
its McDonald's neighbor neighbored by Italian restaurants, a Bananna
Republic, more outdoor seating and coffee on the sidewalk. It is not an
urban punk wonderland, though it remains its central flavor of bohmia and
beat. In Washington Square, I was entertained by some rather eclectic
performances-a fire juggler on a surfboard in the middle of the fountain,
an old bag lady who danced with her ballerina string-puppet to scratchy
classical tunes from the radio beside her, a Bob Dylan impersonator who
yelled at onlookers to spare change. By July I discovered that the
Jamaican men who played chess all day at the far end of the park were
also the most respected marijuana dealers in the city. Beautiful white
and brick rowhouses and NYU surround this park of people-watchers,
dogwalkers, and tourists.
Broadway and Lincoln Center could hardly be called edgy or bohemian--no
one in the East Village wears suits and overcoats to see a show. SoHo
(short for south of Houston Street), which is south of East Village,
offers the ultimate in Manhattan shopping and New York and European
hip-but unlike the East is very trendy and pricey. NoHo shares the East's
fine cuisines but is more state-of-the-art and home to expensive
furniture artists. What separates the East from the West, and the East
from other districts, is the East's embrace of its buzzing, anarchic,
ornery surrounds. I can say with certainty I was better prepared the
second trip back.
Susie Cook
Works Cited:
Gilman, John and Robert Heide, Greenwich Village.
http://www.greenwich-village.com/history.
9 January 2002.
Jackson, Kenneth T. The Encyclopedia of New York City. Yale University
Press, 1995:
pp. 506-509. Edited excerpt by Greenwich Village Society for Historic
Preservation. http://www.preserv.org/gvshp/history.
9 January 2002.
http://www.trudang.com/arts/meve.html:
"East Village Expressionism, 1980-87."