Out and About in the East Village, Part 1

In this weekly feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Arthur Nersesian
Occupation: Writer
Location: Angelina Café, Avenue A between 2nd and 3rd Street
Time: 1 pm on Wednesday, Nov. 19

I was born and raised in the city. My grandfather was born on 9th Street and Avenue B, behind St. Brigid’s in 1899, so I didn’t make it very far. My mother’s side is Irish and my father’s side is Armenian. I grew up in Midtown for my first 10 years of life, on 50th and 3rd, when it was still a low- to middle-income German-Irish neighborhood. Our entire block got evicted. We had lived in a 5-story tenement and we paid something like $50 a month for an entire month, rent controlled. Of course the whole block was evicted and now it’s a 75-story office building.

Throughout my life we’d come down to the Village. I had memories of coming to the East Village when my mother was getting her MSW at NYU. I have this indelible memory of seeing the Alamo, the black cube in Astor Place.

But through the early 1970s, Broadway was kind of the Rubicon that you didn’t pass. East of Broadway you were kind of asking for it. I remember in the early 1970s venturing down to the East River Park for the first time and just being amazed by how far east the city went down here.

A story that I always tell is when I lost my virginity. It was a girl who was living between A and B on 7th Street, in 1973 or 1974. I was about 16 years old. I remember, we had the sacred moment and then as I was walking home it was totally desolate and somebody was sort of throwing bottles and cursing at me. I just thought this is not worth losing your virginity for. I was convinced I was not going to make it. I was trying to make it to 3rd Avenue because cabs did not go East of 3rd. I thought, I am going to die here tonight and it wasn’t worth it. The moment that every young man craves, but all I remember is the terror. I don’t remember anything erotic about it. Am I going to make it out of the East Village? I’m never coming back here again.

As someone who was born and raised in the city, I remember seeing it steadily getting worse. I mean, everyone I knew back then kind of saw it as going the way of Detroit. I thought New York was going to go under. Everyone had an escape plan. Everyone had gotten mugged and burglarized. People don’t understand. You paid your rent with your guts and everybody had stories, if not a story. You just saw the city shrinking. I really thought I was going to have to find somewhere else to move to, after three generations.

If you had asked a 1979 Arthur Nersesian how New York would look in 2014, I would have said by this point Midtown would be part of the slum that stretched from Crown Heights and Brownsville and Bed-Stuy. The Lower East Side would have completely encompassed Midtown. You saw the city shrinking, spreading into this metastasized cancer of the city going under.

But I ended up moving into the East Village when I was 22. I had been hanging out here throughout the 1970s as it slowly got better and then in 1981 I moved to where I am now on First Avenue.

The 1980s was the hippie entrepreneur period and there was a lot of collective work. It was affordability, the notion of grabbing a storefront and turning it into an art gallery. You did feel this sense of possibility. I was part of the Lower East Side Literary Journal.

It’s amazing how this area had these wonderful artistic communities within this tight area, these music communities, the punks on up, to the artistic communities, the abstract expressionists on 10th Street, a theatre community, little theatre row, even a film community all packed into this one area with a certain level of overlap. And then you had these overlapping demographics, such as the local Latin community and some of the old time Italian and Jewish community people. They made for a really interesting stew. It was just a perfect balance of economy and artistry and sensibility and a kind of anarchy where you felt like you could do stuff. You felt like you could be left alone. It was just a really great place to grow up as an artist and to find your footing.

I did every kind of odd job you can imagine. Just in this neighborhood, I worked in the St. Marks Cinema on the corner of 2nd Avenue and St. Mark's Place at $3.35 an hour. It was rough. It was the hardest money you ever earned in your life. It’s always that way, the lowest pay and the hardest work. You had to deal with a lot of the locals, the tougher kids, and you had to deal with the alcoholics and addicts and so on. For $3.35 an hour to take a punch, that was a pretty hard way to make a living. After that I managed the Cinema Village over on 12th Street.

That was the invisible, x-factor here. It was kind of unwieldy, tough, and at the same time it kept things very real. Second Avenue from St. Mark's to 5th Street would be lined with people who basically just went through the garbage cans and found what they could and they would put it on a blanket. I’d get everything from clothes, to books, to you name it — old phones, antiques. I don’t know if any of them were actually stolen but they seemed to be recovered. There was this active grassroots economy of people who came here and unfolded their wares.

I always wrote. It took time to learn how to do it. Writing is a wonderful calling but it’s a bad profession. I always equate it to being a heroin addict without getting high. You spend your whole life struggling to do this thing, to set time aside so you can write. You beg, borrow and steal to be able to create the time to do all this work. And I’m regarded as this relative success. My 11th book came out and I’m still doing odd jobs. It’s a hell of a profession.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

Next week: Arthur Nersesian learns that one of his novels is being made into a movie in Tompkins Square Park. "The PA stops me and says, 'I'm sorry we're shooting a film here you can't come in.’ So I said, 'Can I ask what's the name of the film you’re shooting?' And they said, 'My Dead Boyfriend, it's based on a novel by Arthur Nersesian called dogrun.' And I said, 'Oh shit, I’m Arthur Nersesian…"