Photos and reporting by Stacie Joy
On Sunday afternoon, East Village–based artist Jackie and her friend Disco Vandenberg set up a small cemetery of cardboard tombstones outside the Avenue A and Ninth Street entrance to Tompkins Square Park.
The markers memorialized some of the neighborhood's late, great businesses and organizations, including The Kiev, Odessa, Gem Spa and the Sunshine Cinema, among many others.
This wasn't just a seasonal installation. Jackie told us it's part of a budding effort to bring neighbors together and reckon with what's been lost — and what's worth protecting.
The tombstone-making session with friends and neighbors was only the group's second meeting.
The next gathering is slated for Saturday, Nov. 15, at 2 p.m. back in Tompkins Square Park, billed as a lesson in "how to be a non-gentrifying East Villager" — or, as they put it, an "ethical transplant class."
The working title for the collective: East Village People's Town.
The group previously posted these "Will this city die?" posters around the neighborhood.
Good for them. Old school EV for the win. Want to add the 103 restaurant on Second Ave, not Jerry's but the original one that was total late night scene. H, a small home design store on 9th Street that was an outlier. Cafe Orlan on St. Marks. All the great junk shops. Peter's Spices. Eileen Fisher's original studio and shop on 9th St, so miss that deal box. Stage Restaurant on Second. The great Great Jones Cafe and so many more.
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