I asked ilyse if she had any memories to share with the photos. Here's what she said:
In 1978 I took a long walk with my camera, heading eastward from my apartment on 2nd Avenue. As I strayed farther and farther into the burnt out and rubble-lot blocks of Alphabet City, I was simultaneously shocked by the desolation and desecration and urban neglect and conditions people had to live in, and awed by the subcultures and the bright and energetic spirit of the people.
Here and there the community was beginning to claim this land and these buildings that had been redlined by banks, burned down by owners, and ignored by government. Some lots had been cleared, some little gardens started. Amidst the drug dealing and desolation were murals and interesting stores and kids playing stickball.
Spray-painted on the side of one building alongside a rubble-filled lot was "Milagro de Loisaida," with a big flower springing up from the destruction.
I was in love. I stayed. I raised my kids here. I'm growing old here. I cling to the little scraps of evidence that the renegade, tenacious, creative spirit still lives amidst the alarming suburbanization of my neighborhood.
Looking forward to seeing more of ilyse's photos from this time...
[Photos © by ilyse kazar. Reposted with permission]
29 comments:
I can see why people would be drawn to this, especially comparing these photos to the ones you posted yesterday of Tompkins Square Park. Who doesn't want to live like a rat?
It's sad to say but I'd take this shell of a city over the Brotropolis of today.
What the naysayers are missing here is the spirit of the people from that time... The photos are haunting and lovely, but what the article describes is the indomitable spirit of the time.
Some of us understand this, and some don't. But it was never about living like a rat... you can do that anywhere. That is a state of mind.
Muzz,thank you for hitting the nail on the head. Where some saw a dump,I saw a great genuine neighborhood that I never wanted to leave.
@Anon 7:15, just belt up, will you? If you were not there you can never understand how something like what is shown in the photos could be preferable to what the EV consists of today. Do you really think that those of us on this site who remember it the way it was and say without hesitation that it was better are ALL deluded fools? Unless you were lucky enough - yes, lucky - to be down here in those days, and walked the quiet, almost empty streets reveling in the sense of freedom, wide-open spaces and the feeling that literally ANYTHING was possible in a neighborhood so forgotten, then you can have no idea. Those who came and stayed were visionaries, urban survivalists who looked beyond the blight and saw the beating heart and, like Ilyse and so many others - fell in love with what was not the prettiest girl at the ball but definitely, far and away, the most interesting and challenging.
Amazing photos! Like a time machine.
The first picture is looking at 334 East 8th St.
Here is the second picture but taken in 1986:
https://plus.google.com/photos/114010017362165565741/albums/5742945030136485745/5923110944631830946?pid=5923110944631830946&oid=114010017362165565741
Seems to me that there's got to be something inbetween what was then and what is now. The neighborhood didn't have to go from burned-out to luxury-only. But I guess that's not as satisfying as tossing rat comments at each other.
To all the Faux dreamers here, a dose of reality. I grew there as the lone whit Jewish family. Utoopia it wasnt. It was scary and dangerous. If you like Gang fights (I lost a childhood buddy to bullets) and torched cars and random violence, then this would be your cup of tea. Having spent my childhood and young aduld I say "no thanks" and "good riddance"
To the delusional EVGREAVE reader, Poverty aint pretty. Try being poor instead of romancing it.
Gojira,
The problem with the glamorization of this area when it looked like Dresden after the bombing is that it's entirely self-centered. A thriving neighborhood was allowed to deteriorate to the point that most of its residents left, and a handful of people found this desirable. It's parasitic.
whether it is glamorization or not, I'm interested in the story and more photos, I hope.
It speaks volumes that the people moving to the East Village today are making us pine for bombed out buildings and crack dens. That heroin addicts and criminals seem more tolerable than suburban transients and college kids.
It wasn't easy growing up without money, which I did -- elsewhere. And I have never made much money, I just try to live my life.
When I came to NyC, back in the day (around the time of these photos, in fact) I learned to balance my personal safety with this incredible creative possibility, as did so many people who created a fascinating and wonderful neighborhood (full of community gardens, I might add!)
It's the lack of a middle ground, the famine to feast, which someone else has mentioned, that is the larger issue here these days.
- Muzz
In order for the survivalists to have their urban playground, tens of thousands of people had to be displaced. Those who couldn't afford to leave were abandoned to their misery. These aren't different processes, they're different moments in the same process.
It's hardly a surprise that people who sought isolation amid destruction would object to their solitude being disturbed. It's hard to image that some of them would look favorably on any improvements.
As far as the photos themselves, I agree that they are interesting, just as photos of Dresden are interesting. And you know, there were people then who preferred the destruction, and prospered, but no one sympathized with them.
I live on that block in 1981 a few years after these photos were taken. It looked the same except there was more trash and torched stolen cars lying around. As an art student it was all I could afford. I rented a big railroad apartment that was at least 60 ft long and about 14 feet wide at the ends. There was seldom hot water and sometimes no water at all, the heat came on occasionally in the winter and four men entered my apartment in the middle of the night while I was sleeping but the rent was $260 per month. A roommate made that $130. Please don't romanticize this time too much, there were drug addicts everywhere and their suffering was obvious and fatal.
If you want the same spirit today, there are plenty of parts of Pittsburgh and Buffalo and Cleveland and Chicago and Cincinnati and (most obivously) Detroit and the rest of the Rust Belt, even Newburgh within public transit range, that are in similar shape and that similarly welcome people who want to fix up run down spaces and live as they wish. Many of them have big old houses available for well under $100,000. None of them are as cosmopolitan, but they are still big cities with much of what big cities have to offer.
But New York City is in the midst of a vast housing shortage that is unlikely to ease unless zoning is dramatically loosened, quality of life falls precipitiously, or the local economy no longer offers salaries far outstripping the rest of the country. And so long as that housing shortage exists, there will be far more gentrification than abandoned buildings.
"But it was never about living like a rat... you can do that anywhere. That is a state of mind."
Amen.
What the people who complain about us miss is that we moved here to stop living like rats. A lot of us grew up in neighborhoods that were safer, cleaner, more green ... and full of people who like to vote for the "family values" of Rick Santorum. The East Village wasn't safe or clean but if you moved here you know why you did it.
Now the people we fled are following us here, and we're not sure that's because they've changed their mind about us. Yes, they are moving to a place with more community gardens, fewer cars, and left-wing churchs, so they *should* have changed their minds. They seem happy enough to take what we created but they don't seem to understand why we created it in the first place.
"They seem happy enough to take what we created but they don't seem to understand why we created it in the first place."
Brilliantly said.
I grew-up poor and moved here because I was poor and it was one of the few neighborhoods I could afford as a young person without parents who could support them. In exchange for cheap rents we dealt with crime, dirty sidewalks, lack of heat, hot water etc, but were willing to do it, because there was something unique about the LES. There was a rich history. The people arriving in droves now, don't want to be part of the LES, they want the LES to be the same as the places they have come from. A simple example is the amount of Papa John's Pizza boxes that pile up in the lobby of my building every Sunday morning. Why eat this stuff when you can get a fantastic slice of pizza in a dozen or more places? Frankly it feels more dangerous to me on any given Friday night or especially during Santa Con. Drunken people careening into traffic, knocking over trash cans, gettting into fights over cabs, etc. At least when I walked the streets years ago, I knew the faces of the guys doing the bad things, and if I left them alone, they left me alone. Now I don't know who these people are that cause mayhem on our streets? When my building was taken over by Ben Shaoul, it was just like the old days again. No heat, not hot water, filty hallways, garbage everywhere, broken intercom, broken front door, bulgaries - you name it. The difference is, the landlord back then was just neglecting the building, Shaoul used these things as a tactic to drive people out. I would much prefer to take my chances with the challenges the old LES presented then to deal with the so called progress of today.
@2:12 Very well said. Wooing girls in the hallway wearing shoes they can't walk in. Yoing bros breaking beer bottles on the stairs from the night before and not cleaning it up. And the landlord ignoring both the market rate and rent stabilized alike. At least when I was growing up in the building I knew to wake up in time to boil water for my bath. Now sometimes there isn't water or gas.
The Lower East Side is like that great party everyone has gone to at least one time in their life; if you got there early, you think that all the people who arrived later missed everything and were a bunch of losers who ruined the great party you were having before they ruined everything. If you got there later, you think it was still the greatest party ever except for all those losers who got here too early and were already too drunk and rowdy to have a good time.
Timing + relative perspective = reality.
I'm not surprised that the single most important cause of this goes unmentioned. That would be the high inflation of the Trixon-Ford (not a Lincoln)-Carter cabal years, which caused property owners' costs to surge. That combined with the idiotic rent controls (a stupid WW II holdover) meant that they operated their businesses at a loss. Which meant no investment in them, which resulted in the desolate landscape pictured in the photos.
Bill the libertarian anarchist
@Bill the libertarian anarchist
You might not have been aware that a lot of cities in the US were hit hard in the 70's. As for the LES the biggest factor was drugs. Young people could make big bucks selling, big bucks leads to organized gangs, and violence used to run that business. Working class families that could afford to leave did just that. As for rent stabilization it helped keep the middle class in NYC during that time. Landlords need to money to maintain buildings I agree and they should be able to profit as well but at what time do you through out a family that has lived in your building for 30 years and is now retired? Today the little landlords are selling out to the big money guys not so they can buy and island in the Bahamas and retire but because Bloombergs property tax makes it impossible for them to keep their building. So I guess you could say that the family that owned a building for 75 years had a tax rate version of rent control.
No city was hit nearly as hard as the People's Republic of New York.
Drugs did not cause property owners not to invest in their property.
A free market in drugs and property (and banking, but that's another issue--get rid of the Fed entity) would have prevented much of New York from looking like the moon.
Bill the libertarian anarchist
As usual, the anarchist answer ignores the political economy. The people of this area, but other neighborhoods as well, were the victims of a global capitalist crisis. In relative terms, cities like Pittsburgh and Youngstown suffered far more, with Detroit following. And the industrial and mining town of England.
What distinguishes the cities of the US and UK from those of Germany (for example), that also lost manufacturing, is the near total absence of worker protections. People didn't watch their buildings crumble around them.
Of course BLA, in his Rush Limbaugh voice, would call that "big gubmint."
"Drugs did not cause property owners not to invest in their property."
"That combined with the idiotic rent controls (a stupid WW II holdover) meant that they operated their businesses at a loss"
I don't believe that rent control was the only reason the LES descended into decay. The rest of the city did fairly well during that period of time with those same laws. The volume of drugs was staggering along with the lack of police protection, and I consider that to be the main reason the area descended into a pit.
From Ave A east there was no alternate side of the street parking until Operation Pressure Point in 84. I never saw a street cleaner in the neighborhood until sometime in 84 or 85 because the city didn't care and it was easier to have this be a dumping ground for the poor,drugged out and desperate.
The problems you mention are all caused by gubment, which controls the streets and the police.
The problem was not capitalism, it was gubment, i.e. socialismo.
Bill the libertarian anarchist
SMASH THE STATE!
BC did not say:
"The problems you mention are all caused by gubment, which controls the streets and the police.
The problem was not capitalism, it was gubment, i.e. socialismo.
Bill the libertarian anarchist
SMASH THE STATE!"
The above is why I rarely discuss politics with Conservatives.
Many of the survivalist would like to go back to these days free squat housing no matter how unfit stolen electricity from a city lamp post that has been jeri-rigged. You complain about the antics of the new generation but never try to engage them...often come spring you see them as volunteers cleaning gardens painting park benches and the druggies and crusties well not really..just here to shit were they live and eat I guess!
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