"Its quirky feel has come to symbolize the avant-garde, rebellious East Village spirit"

The Daily News takes a look at Red Square on East Houston:

Conceived by self-proclaimed radical sociologist-turned-real-estate-developer [Michael] Rosen in 1989, Red Square occupies land that served as an automobile service station for more than 25 years. Rosen's wife's family bought the property in the 1960s, and, he points out, no homes were destroyed and no businesses were displaced.Red Square was designed by graphic artist legend Tibor Kalman, a Hungarian immigrant. Its quirky feel has come to symbolize the avant-garde, rebellious East Village spirit.

Hmmm.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Looking back: Red Square and gentrification

“Oh, God, we’re living in a hell that I can’t even begin to describe!”

That's Arthur Nersesian, the 49-year-old playwright, poet and novelist, talking about the changes in his home neighborhood of the East Village. He's the subject of an entertaining profile in the Times today.

Unlike many New Yorkers who inhabited the East Village of the 1980s, Mr. Nersesian seemed to remember every aspect of that gritty and often dangerous time with fondness. Even as he described the endless parade of prostitutes down East 12th Street or the bonfires set by the homeless in Tompkins Square Park, there was a palpable tenderness to his voice.
“There was a sense of community there,” Mr. Nersesian said. “I couldn’t walk down the street without saying hello to someone. You’d see Allen Ginsberg all over the place, and you’d see the other Beats.
“I wasn’t the biggest fan of the Beats, but there was an exemplary quality to the artist as citizen. You think about artists today in our society, and they’re kind of removed. You don’t really know them. When Ginsberg died, a definitive quality from the East Village — at least from my East Village — was gone.”
Perhaps inevitably, the East Village of today, with its fashionable bars and restaurants and its gleaming glass towers, fills him with despair. “Oh, God, we’re living in a hell that I can’t even begin to describe!” Mr.
Nersesian said mournfully that day at the diner. “It’s amazing how memory really does become a kind of curse. If I was just coming to the city today, I’d probably think, ‘Oh, this is a really interesting place,’ but it’s trying to tell people, ‘You know, there was a war fought here, a strange economic, cultural battle that went on, and I saw so many wonderful people lost among the casualties.’ ”

Also from the article:

In his 1992 play “Rent Control,” Mr. Nersesian incorporated an experience he had when he returned to the office tower that had replaced his childhood apartment.
“I tried to go to the exact same space,” he recalled, “and it turned out to be the romance division of Random House or something. I walked in and the secretary said, ‘Can I help you?’ And I think I tried to convey to her that this was where I lived for the first 10 years of my life; this space here was where I was bathed in the sink. And she looked at me like I was a nut.”

[Image: Andrew Henderson/The New York Times]

When the Christodora House became a Greek house

[Photos by Charlie Kerman]

In 1983, when the Christodora House on Avenue B was still abandoned, members of the Tau Delta Phi, Delta Eta Chapter at Cooper Union, placed their Greek letters on the west side atop the 17-floor building. Don't have a lot of details, such as how long the letters remained there. Long enough for a photo opp, of course. Photos of the letters crew are below. (Note the condition of the Christodora...)

HOWL: Temporarily returning the East Village to its "humble beginnings"

New York Press on the HOWL! festival, which starts Friday and runs through Sept. 11:

Saving the iconic neighborhood from what one performer describes as “yuppie scum,” the HOWL! Festival’s organizers vow to temporarily return the East Village to its humble beginnings: Before streets became “crowded with people drinking,” as [artist Riki] Colon says, and before the upper middle class invested in housing while anxiously awaiting graffiti-free streets. HOWL! seeks to revive the beat poetry shouted from street corners and the days when artists were viewed as visionaries. This year’s festival has an additional endeavor: to make HOWL! relevant to a new generation, thereby passing along the East Village’s explosive, controversial and irreplaceable legacy.

Reminder tonight!: Richard Sandler

Two documentaries by Richard Sandler, Brave New York and Sway, are playing tonight in the community garden at Sixth Street and Avenue B. (Brave New York chronicles the East Village from 1988-2003.)

Previously on EV Grieve:
Richard Sandler's New York City

[Image: Richard Sandler, 1982]

"Entire blocks were filled with little more than rubble and bricks"

[Photo by Q. Sakamaki]

The Times features photographer Q. Sakamaki today, who has a new book out on Tompkins Square Park. (I did a short piece on it for Curbed today, too, and there was quite a bit of feedback on the topic...)

Upon arriving in the city in 1986 he settled in the East Village, where he was alternately charmed and horrified by what he found. Dilapidated and abandoned buildings lined the streets. Entire blocks were filled with little more than rubble and bricks. Heroin was sold in candy stores, and gunshots sounded in the night. In the morning he sometimes spotted the bodies of people who had been killed or had died of overdoses.

Also, in this week's issue of the Voice, Lynn Yaeger goes on a walking tour of the neighborhood with Sakamaki.

Previously on EV Grieve:
Looking at the Tompkins Square Park riots in black and white

East Village 1988: "A Neighborhood of Vigorous Opinions"

[Photo by dmax3270 via Flickr]

Gertrude Briggs, 77, has been selling used art, dance, and literary books at her store, Books 'n' Things, for 41 years, most recently from a stuffy little shop on East Seventh street that has books stacked to the ceiling or in boxes.
''Most of the creative people have been displaced,'' she said, as she closed a sale with a customer from the Bronx. ''Of course it still attracts a lot of freaks, because it's still a place you can be free. For a lot kids, coming here is a way to get away from the choking atmosphere of suburbia.''
''It's almost like geographical determinism -- he gravitates here because he has no choice,'' offered the customer, who identified himself only as Carlos. ''That's what attracted me in the first place when I was going through my Marxist phase. The flyers, the posters, the cracking peeling walls -- it's a glimpse of Old Amsterdam, of Old New York.''

(From an Aug. 13, 1988, New York Times article titled The Talk of the East Village; A Neighborhood of Vigorous Opinions)

Nearly 90 years of Lower East Side history in 5 minutes (or so)

[Window Shade Repairman, St. Marks Place, New York, 1938, by Joe Schwartz. Via Stephen Cohen Gallery]

I was just looking through the archives from 1851-1980 at the Times. (Bought a few articles for some research.) There's a handy free preview with each article that let's you see the headline, date published, author and first paragraph. (While looking at the first paragraph, I was reminded of my first day in a newswriting class, when my professor told us that, with a strong lead, someone doesn't need to read the rest of the article.)

In any event, here are some kind-of random headlines and first paragraphs of articles from the Times that span nearly 90 years. This isn't meant as an exhaustive LES history, just a snapshot that provides a slice-of-life of, uh, life in the neighborhood . . . as well as its subsequent cultural transformation.

• SPLIT ON THEOSOPHY'S ROCK; MORE TROUBLE IN THE WILSON INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL. Resignation of the Matron, Mrs. Armstrong, and of Miss Kirkwood, a Teacher, Requested at a Hurriedly-Called Meeting Lost Friday -- The School, Left Almost Without Teachers, Ordered Closed -- Managers Have Taken Sides, and Serious Dissension Is in Prospect.

June 26, 1893

The spread of Theosophy among the Faculty of the Wilson Industrial School for Girls, at St. Mark's Place and Avenue A. has culminated in the dismissal of two other teachers and the indefinite closing of the school.

• PARKHURST RAID SUCCEEDS; Evidence Against a Tammany Man Discovered in St. Mark's Place -- Inspector Thompson Finds Little.
March 9, 1900

Marked contrast was shown between two raids of alleged poolrooms in this city yesterday. When agents of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, of which the Rev. Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst is President, swooped down upon a place at 9 St. Mark's Place they surprised more than 300 men and boys, and caught two alleged principals with money in their hands, and also seized a wagonload of poolroom paraphernalia.

• GAMBLERS RESIST RAID.; Throw Furniture at Detectives Who Enter Resort in St. Mark's Place.
May 9, 1912

Lieut. Becker and nine members of the "Strong Arm" squad drove up to 6 St. Mark's Place yesterday afternoon in a moving van, sprang from it, and ran up to the second floor of the house, where they found themselves confronted by an icechest door. While they battered at this with axes several shots were fired from inside the room and the detectives fired back. No one was hit.

• CHIEF AND GANGMEN HELD FOR MURDER; 'Dopey' Benny's Crowd Rounded Up and Charged with Killing Court Clerk Straus. MITCHEL AND McKAY ACT Mayor Will Give Police More Power -- Capt. Sweeney Suspended for Neglect.
January 11, 1914

Edward Morris, better known as "Fat Bull," a former Special Deputy Sheriff and official "bouncer" of Arlington Hall at 19-23 St. Mark's Place, before which Frederick Straus, a clerk of the City Court, was shot and killed on Friday evening; broke down last night under questioning by Second Deputy Commissioner Dougherty and Inspector Faurot.

• OLD ESTATE SALE.; St. Mark's Place Holdings of Wealthy Goldbeater at Auction.
February 28, 1915

Three tenements on St. Mark's Place (East Eighth Street) will be sold in the Vesey Street Salesroom by Joseph P. Day on Tuesday. Over half a century ago St. Mark's Place and Second Avenue were as fashionable residential thoroughfares as could be found in the city. The property is to be sold for the Nicholas Schultz estate.

• 12-FOOT WALL HIDES ONCE DAZZLING SHOP; It Is Designed to Check an Exodus of Doctors from St. Mark's Place. CONCEALS A SODA OASIS Menchell's Methods of Attracting Trade Became Unpopular with Medical Neighbors.
August 26, 1915

When the shop of Isrial Menchell at 13 St. Mark's Place, which dispenses candy, soda water, cigarettes, and souvenir postal cards to the inhabitants of that particular section of Manhattan Island, began to thrive and prosper some eight months ago, Menchell's neighbors, instead of showing pleasure at this prosperity, were inclined to carp and criticise.

• BLACK HAND PANICS SPREAD IN SCHOOLS; Three More Scares in One Day -- Police and Teachers Hunt the Troublemakers. LOLLYPOPS PARTLY BLAMED Black Candy in Shape of Hand Sold to Children -- Excited Mothers Add to Disorder.
June 18, 1926, Friday

Stirred by three more Black Hand panics in schools on the lower east side of Manhattan yesterday, in one of which 2,300 children and almost as many mothers and friends milled about the building in excited mobs, Police Commissioner George V. Mclaughlin and Superintendent of Schools William J. O'Shea took active steps yesterday afternoon to bring the scare to an end.

• FOUND WITH DYNAMITE, HELD IN PALMIERI CASE; Subway Blaster's Helper Had Fashioned Bomb, but Says It Was for Fishing Expedition.
March 6, 1927

A man who identified himself as George Falley, 40 years old, of 414 East Ninth Street, a blaster's helper in the subway, was arrested in a furnished room at 63 St. Mark's Place yesterday afternoon on the charge of having dynamite in his possession illegally, which is a felony.

• SNOWFALL A BOON TO THE JOBLESS; 300 at The Tub Are Put to Work Clearing Streets and Ledoux Postpones Auction. HE OUTFITS HIS WARDS Bankers' Journal Says One Cause of Unemployment Is Strikes In Coat Fields.
March 10, 1928

Because the Street Cleaning Department needed snow shovelers, the scheduled auction of unemployed by Urbain (Zero) Ledoux, in his shelter, The Tub, 12 St. Mark's Place, did not take place yesterday afternoon.

• RECEIVER DEBATED FOR 'MR. ZERO'S' $37; Court Decrees It Must Act for "the Tub's" Rent if There Is a Bank Account. FUNDS NOT HIS, HE SAYS But Counsel for Landlord Seeking $7,345 Contends Contributions Were Pledged by Ledoux.
June 10, 1931

Urban J. Ledoux, who as Mr. Zero carries on relief work for Bowery derelicts, appeared before Supreme Court Justice Walsh yesterday to oppose an application by Mrs. Anna M. Brindell for the appointment of a receiver for his property in an effort to collect something on a judgment for $7,345 obtained against Ledoux a year ago for rent of The Tub at 12 St. Mark's Place.

• FINDS LOWER EAST SIDE SUITED ONLY TO RICH; Housing Expert Says Land Value Demands Costly Dwellings -- Doubtful of Present Plans.
March 18, 1932

Addressing the housing section of the Welfare Council last night, Carol Aronovici, housing and town-planning expert, decried the efforts to rehabilitate the lower east side as a residential area for the poor.

• CROWD AT WEDDING STAMPEDED BY FIRE; ONE KILLED, 40 HURT; 250 Rush for Exits of Hall as Flames Start in Canopy Over Head of Bride-to-Be.
June 16, 1935

Fire that started in the canopy beneath which the bride-to-be was sitting, just before the wedding ceremony was to have begun, drove 250 relatives and friends into a stampede for the exits of a first-floor hall of The Mansion, 57 St. Mark's Place, just before last midnight.

• Nine Persons Routed From Tenement Homes When Wall Cracks, Threatening Collapse
March 10, 1938

Nine persons, imperiled by a cracked wall that caused an inspector to declare the building in danger of collapse, were ordered from their homes in an old-law tenement at 82 St. Mark's Place last night, while the police roped off the sidewalk to keep passers-by from possible injury.

• Changes Are Noted in Lower East Side; Indoor Markets Eliminating Pushcarts
February 21, 1939

The lower East Side of Manhattan is in the public eye these days. This old neighborhood south of Fourteenth Street is undergoing many changes which realty men and property owners hope will help to bring about the long-awaited revival of interest in the district.

• Fewer Tenements on the Lower East Side Now Unprotected Against Hazard of Fire
August 8, 1940

Thousands of tenants of old buildings on the lower East Side of Manhattan below Fourteenth Street are living in quarters which are much safer from fire hazards than they were a year ago.

• Mecca Theatre on Ave. A Sold for $170,000; Site Included in East Side Housing Project
April 23, 1943

The Mecca Theatre and the adjoining stores occupying the west side of Avenue A from Fourteenth to Fifteenth Street, have been acquired by the Acropolis Holding Corporation, a subsidiary of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, as part of the site for the big post-war housing project which the insurance company will erect on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

• COURT SANCTIONS STUYVESANT TOWN; High State Bench Approves Building of 'Walled City' on East Side After War
December 3, 1943

By a vote of 4 to 2, the Court of Appeals refused today to enjoin the building in the post-war period, of Stuyvesant Town, the eighteen-block "walled city" planned by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company on Manhattan's lower East Side

• HOLD-UP SUSPECTS CAPTURED IN STORE; Police Balk 3 Armed Men as They Line Up Victims in St. Mark's Place Shop
January 29, 1946

Balked by a patrolman breaking in through a side door, three armed hold-up men who were lining up eight victims in the rear of a candy store at 102 St. Marks Place, near First Avenue, were captured yesterday and one of them was shot when he made a dash for freedom.

• AIR RAID TEST SET IN EAST SIDE AREA; Drill Tomorrow Evening Will Be Based on Assumed Atom Bomb Drop 3 Miles Away
June 24, 1954

A four-block area on the lower East Side, just above Manhattan Bridge, will be the center tomorrow night of the third annual Civil Defense training exercise in this city.

• Our Changing City: :Old Lower Manhattan Area; New East Side Housing Provides Most of Difference in the Last 25 Years
June 24, 1955

The oldest part of New York -- from Fourteenth Street southward --looks and is pretty much as it was twenty-five years ago with one spectacular exception.

• CAR KILLS 1, HURTS 7; Plows Into Pedestrians on Sidewalk on East Side
November 27, 1961

A man was killed and seven other persons were injured yesterday when a station wagon mounted a sidewalk at St. Mark's Place and Avenue A on the East Side, struck pedestrians, smashed a fire hydrant and then hit a car that rammed a third car.

• It's Stupendous, Colossal Tiny; It's a Circus With Clowns and Animals and Even Poetry on St. Mark's Place
By GAY TALESE
December 21, 1961

St. Mark's Place, a rather bizarre street of the avant garde and Russian bath rubbers, was made no less whimsical yesterday by the sight of a llama staring languidly down from a window at pedestrians below.

• Black Jeans to Go Dancing at the Movies: It's Inevitable
April 11, 1966

WHAT does one wear to go dancing at the movies? Anything.

• THE NEW BOWERY: AN ERA OF CHANGE Shops, Theaters and Artists Drift Down the Street

October 16, 1966

The Bowery is slowly changing. Theaters and antique stores are to be found on the dismal thoroughfare and at the intersection Cooper Square at its northern end. Artists who once only rented lofts on the Bowery have begun to purchase and convert buildings; the number of studios increases yearly.

• TALK IS STRANGE IN EAST VILLAGE; Drug Users Are 'Heads' and a 'Bag' Is an Event
April 16, 1967

"This is the real bag. The scene here is where it's at and we don't need any outsiders. We've all sees shrinks and they couldn't help us. We have to find out ourselves where our head is and then we're O.K."Crime and Violence Are Commonplace in Nether World of Lower East Side March 20, 1969To the casual observer, the Lower East Side block where a youth was tortured and burned to death this week is a grimy string of dingy tenements, murky storefronts and nondescript industrial establishments.

• Swinging in the East Village Has Its Ups and Downs; UPS AND DOWNS IN EAST VILLAGE
July 15, 1967

Hundreds of Negroes and whites from all over the city and from Connecticut, New Jersey and Long Island are converging in the East Village these nights to dance at the old Polish National Hall building at 23 St. Mark's Place.

• 500 HIPPIES DANCE AND PLANT A TREE; St. Mark's Place Jammed as Police Watch Patiently
August 13, 1967

Five hundred hippies and hangers-on jammed St. Marks Place near Third Avenue for about two hours late last night. They danced, shouted and planted a 5-foot evergreen in the middle of the street.

• Downtown Boutique For Uptown Crowd
January 5, 1968

THERE'S no one named Gussie or Becky at Gussie Becky. Ruth Graves, designer and owner of the boutique at 20 St. Mark's Place, just likes to play with names. Now there's a new Gussie Becky up one flight at 717 Lexington Avenue (between 57th and 58th Streets).

• 60 Hippies in a Bus See the Sights of Quaint Queens
September 23, 1968

A group of East Village hippies who became annoyed with the increasing number of tourist buses visiting St. Mark's Place turned the tables with a vengeance yesterday.

• For Many Hippies, Christmas Means Emptiness; HIPPIES' LAUGHTER MASKS EMPTINESS
December 26, 1968

A raw wind rattled the gates of the closed stores along St. Mark's Place yesterday. The street was cold and empty and filthy.

• Not a Boy, Not a Girl, Just Me'
November 2, 1969

JACKIE CURTIS, 21, 5 feet 11 inches, gender male, "not a boy, not a girl, not a faggot, not a drag queen, not a transsexual -- just me, Jackie," grooving down St. Mark's Place in miniskirt, ripped black tights, clunky heels, chestnut curls, no falsies ("I'm not trying to pass as a woman"), Isadora scarf gallantly breezing behind her, is the newest playwright to make the Off Off Broadway scene.

• You Don't Have to Be High
December 28, 1969

IT's 2 A.M. at the Fillmore East, just down freaky Second Avenue from St. Mark's Place, and John Mayall, lanky in white bell-bottoms and a headband, is going "chicka-chicka" into his harmonica and driving the audience wild.

• 'VELVET' ROCK GROUP OPENS STAND HERE
July 4, 1970

SAN FRANCISCO: The Velvet Underground was playing experimental rock in 1965 when the Beatles just wanted to hold your hand and San Francisco was still the place where Tony Bennett left his heart.

• W.H. Auden Plans to Move Back Home to England
February 7, 1972

Another great institution is leaving New York City -- a one-man corporation of letters named W. H. Auden.

• Rock Meets Disco: Where To Try It; Rock Meets Disco: Where To Try It The Mudd Club Hurrah Trude Heller Now The Rocker Room Club 57 and Studio 10
April 27, 1979

THERE'S a different sort of disco in Manhattan these days, and its proliferation shows every sign of becoming a genuine trend. These "new wave" discotheques are still mostly large, dark places with flashing lights and eager crowds dancing to pulsating, heavily amplified music. But the music they are dancing to isn't disco; it's rock-and-roll.

• The Pop Life; Growth, change and David Johansen.
August 17, 1979

ROCK-AND-ROLL can be a cruel profession, enforcing stylistic limits on those who'd like to grow and branding others as losers before they've even had a chance to win.

The Lower East Side/East Village: The neighborhood continues to go (AGAIN AND AGAIN AND...)

I recently posted the May 28, 1984, New York magazine cover story titled "The Lower East Side: There Goes the Neighborhood." WELL! Turns out New York wasn't the only media outlet in town to notice something going on in the East Village/Lower East Side.

On Sept. 2, 1984, the Times took a similar look at the neighborhood in a piece cleverly titled "The gentrification of the East Village."

To some excerpts!

WHEN Susan Kelley looks out her window she sees a beginning. ''There are so many young professionals sitting on the stoops, ties undone, just talking,'' said the 24-year-old Wall Street real-estate broker as she surveyed East 13th Street, where she has lived for two years. ''There's a feeling of togetherness, of movement. A feeling that things are different every day.''

When Barbara Shaum looks out her window she sees an end. ''I see them walking down the street in identical blue suits with their briefcases and I think, 'There goes the neighborhood,' '' said the leathercrafts maker who has lived in a loft behind her studio on East Seventh Street for 21 years. ''Why are all these people coming here, where they're so riotously out of place? I don't want my neighborhood to change.''

In the meantime, residents of the East Village live in a mixture of past and present, hope and anxiety.

The neighborhood is now home to people like Miss Kelley, who graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton two years ago with a degree in art history and works for a Wall Street real estate broker. She moved to her renovated two-bedroom apartment on 13th Street because the rent was low - $900 a month, which she splits with a friend - and ''because it was an adventure - I liked the idea of being part of the change.''

It is also home to people like Mrs. Shaum, who watched her neighbors come and go in waves for more than two decades - first immigrants, then flower children, then drug dealers and now young artists and professionals. The rent on her store and adjoining loft was $200 until last year, when her landlord tried to evict her and renovate the building. After a court fight he agreed to give her a three-year lease at $450 a month for the first two years, $500 a month for the last year. ''But when that is up,'' she said ''he's going to try to make me leave again.''

Their neighbors are people like Sally Randall, a fashion editor whose tastes run toward magenta eye glitter and who moved to the area as a student nine years ago and stayed because ''I liked the atmosphere.'' Or Carolyn Dwyer, a clothes designer who opened her boutique, Carioca, on East Ninth Street eight years ago ''because I didn't want to live someplace slick like SoHo.'' Or Mark Clifford, a business writer who has lived near Tompkins Square for three years and felt the need to defend the red Lacoste shirt he was wore to brunch one Saturday morning. ''I'm not one of the preppies everyone's railing against,'' he said. ''This shirt happens to be older than me.''

They recognize the changes they and their peers have brought to the neighborhood.

''When I took these spaces over, nobody wanted them,'' Miss Dwyer said. ''It was a mess outside. People threw garbage in my doorway. I cleaned up, I did my time. To be threatened after you helped to make it a nice place is an insult.''

If you're thinking of living in: The East Village

A few excerpts from a Times article from Oct. 6, 1985, titled "If you're thinking of living in: The East Village:"

PROSPECTIVE buyers of city-owned properties are swarming over the East Village, looking for bargains in hundreds of dilapidated buildings and vacant lots.

Among them are developers and people who cannot afford or will not pay the high rents and condominium prices prevalent elsewhere in Manhattan and hope that the East Village will give them every New Yorker's dream - maximum space for minimal outlay.
Indeed, its proximity to midtown Manhattan and Wall Street is catching the eyes of an increasing number of New Yorkers who view it as the next likely alternative to chic Washington Square, the trendy Upper West Side or the East Side.

A walk through the East Village is all that is needed to see its obvious problems:
* Condominium prices and rents for rehabilitated apartments, while lower than in established Manhattan neighborhoods, are rising fast and are likely to keep rising for the next few years.
* Crime, particularly crime related to drug abuse, is prevalent. Drug deals are made openly in Tompkins Square, the neighborhood's only park, and burglaries have risen markedly, according to officials of the Ninth Police Precinct, which serves the area.
* Quality-of-life problems abound. Residents complain that garbage remains uncollected for weeks, graffiti are endemic and the Fire Department says the East Village is among the most arson-prone areas in the city.

Despite its problems, the East Village has in recent years emerged as perhaps the most artistically avant-garde neighborhood in the city. Its boutiques are stocked with kamikaze clothing and its galleries with doomsday art, adding yet another layer of diversity to its traditional ethnic heterogeneity.

The cultural mix has been further enlivened by an influx of an increasing number of students from New York University, Cooper Union and other colleges, as well as young professionals.

'There are bohemians who live here who are only pretending to be bohemians,'' said Alfred Marston, chairman of Community Board 3 at 137 Second Avenue. ''Actually, many of them are the most straight-laced of people who work days in the financial district and want to shed that prim, professional image at night and on weekends.''

UNLIKE other areas of the city, said Mr. Marston, a financial consultant with a doctorate in economics, ''a lot of people who feel they have missed the boat in their private lives head for the East Village looking for a renewed lease on their youth and, obviously, some of them find it because more well educated, professional people keep coming.''

Mark Rudolph, a free-lance video producer, is such a person. Six months ago, he saw an ad in FYI, the Time Inc. house organ, and eventually moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a newly rehabilitated building at 652 East Sixth Street, near Avenue C. His rent is $900 a month.

In the blocks adjoining his building are dozens of lots, some occupied by squatters living in tents and shacks. ''But you've got to live somewhere,'' said Mr. Rudolph, expressing the feeling of thousands who will not live anywhere but Manhattan.

Rehabilitation of scores of buildings is under way and to hear local developers tell it, the sale of condominiums is brisk. The developers of 65-69 Cooper Square, a new building with 37 studios and one-bedroom condominiums, said more than two-thirds had been sold since it opened several months ago. The apartments range in price from $175,000 to $208,000, with typical maintenance of $329 a month.

But prices are not rising uniformly: The owners of a 20-unit apartment house at 82 East Third Street recently lowered their asking price from $575,000 to $515,000.

Rents for apartments, when available, can be high. Studio apartments on East Ninth Street between First and Second Avenues are being advertised at $725 a month, and two-bedroom apartments at St. Mark's Place and First Avenue have been advertised for $1,500 a month.
Condominium and co-op prices vary widely. Sponsors of a new co-op in a building being rehabilitated at 613 East Sixth Street are asking $165,000 for a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment, with maintenance of about $500 a month.

"The neighborhood was desolate, so underpopulated that landlords would give you a month's free rent just for signing a lease"

[Photo of 216 E. 7th St. in 1979 by Marlis Momber]

My obsession with the East Village in the 1970s and early 1980s continues.

In November 2003, new editions of the bible, Luc Sante's "Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), included an afterword, which was also published in The New York Review of Books on Nov. 6, 2003. (I have an old copy of the book, and was unaware of the essay. By the way, the essay also appears in the booklet that accompanies the Stranger Than Paradise Criterion Collection.)

Here are a few of the many compelling passages from My Lost City:

I drifted down from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side in 1978. Most of my friends made the transition around the same time. You could have an apartment all to yourself for less than $150 a month. In addition, the place was happening. It was happening, that is, in two or at most three dingy bars that doubled as clubs, a bookstore or record store or two, and a bunch of individual apartments and individual imaginations. All of us were in that stage of youth when your star may not yet have risen, but your moment is the only one on the clock. We had the temerity to laugh at the hippies, shamefully backdated by half a decade. In our arrogance we were barely conscious of the much deeper past that lay all around. We didn't ask ourselves why the name carved above the door of the public library on Second Avenue was in German, or why busts of nineteenth-century composers could be seen on a second-story lintel on Fourth Street. Our neighborhood was so chockablock with ruins we didn't question the existence of vast bulks of shuttered theaters, or wonder when they had been new. Our apartments were furnished exclusively through scavenging, but we didn't find it notable that nearly all our living rooms featured sewing-machine tables with cast-iron bases.

The neighborhood was desolate, so underpopulated that landlords would give you a month's free rent just for signing a lease, many buildings being less than half-full, but it was far from tranquil. We might feel smug about being robbed on the street, since none of us had any money, and we looked it, and junkies—as distinct from the crackheads of a decade later—would generally not stab you for chump change. Nevertheless, if you did not have the wherewithal to install gates on your windows you would be burglarized repeatedly, and where would you be without your stereo? In the blocks east of Avenue A the situation was dramatically worse. In 1978 I got used to seeing large fires in that direction every night, usually set by arsonists hired by landlords of empty buildings who found it an easy choice to make, between paying property taxes and collecting insurance. By 1980 Avenue C was a lunar landscape of vacant blocks and hollow tenement shells. Over there, commerce—in food or clothing, say—was often conducted out of car trunks, but the most thriving industry was junk, and it alone made use of marginally viable specimens of the building stock. The charred stairwells, the gaping floorboards, the lack of lighting, the entryways consisting of holes torn in ground-floor walls—all served the psychological imperatives of the heroin trade. . . .

Now, more than a decade after I finally finished my book Low Life, the city has changed in ways I could not have pictured. The tenements are mostly still standing, but I could not afford to live in any of my former apartments, including the ones I found desperately shabby when I was much more inured to shabbiness.

[For more amazing photos by Marlis Momber like the one above, please visit her Web site.]

Reminder!

There 's an Informal Celebration of the Tower of Toys tonight from 7-9 at the 6th Street and Avenue B Community Garden.

The Villager has an article about it this week.

[Props to Jeremiah for having the original scoop. He has an update here.]

I'd love to be there, but I'll be far away at a family function. I look forward to hearing about it.

(And if you're new to all this, swing by Sophie's to take a look at some of his other pieces of art.)



Meanwhile, Alex has a great post at Flaming Pablum on another iconic piece of Avenue B that disappeared some 13 years ago....

Countdown to the Ukrainian Festival

Ah, yes -- one of my favorite neighborhood traditions kicks off this Friday afternoon on 7th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. (Been saving up my $1 bills for Chuk-a-Luck all year!) Community spirit at its finest.

Here's a little on the history of Ukrainians in New York. And on the St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church, the centerpiece of the festival.


[©HK/BRAMA.com]

A little of the entertainment from last year:




Of course, how will this feel this year with all this crapola going on behind us?



Watch out for the cranes.

He would have loved the 37 bank branches that popped up around the corner

So someone told me that Butch Cassidy (as in Butch and the Sundance Kid, Newman and Redford!) lived briefly in the East Village. That someone was right. As the story goes, Butch Cassidy lived in a boardinghouse run by Mrs. Catherine Taylor at 234 E. 12th St. between Second and Third Avenues. This was in 1901. Butch (joined later by the Sundance Kid and his squeeze, Etta Place) hung out here for awhile, spending money, among other things, on their way to Argentina. There's no more No. 234 on the block. That building was torn down to make way for a nursing school. The building now houses a doctor's office and some nice-looking apartments.