40 years gone! Revisiting a classic New York magazine cover story from 1984

If you had a copy of New York magazine this week in 1984, you likely read Craig Unger's cover story, "The Lower East Side: There Goes the Neighborhood." 

Generations have said, "There goes the neighborhood," or various variations, like "The East Village is dead," and even more specifically, as Ada Calhoun has documented, "St. Marks is dead."

I first mentioned this piece on June 6, 2008, roughly seven months into EVG's existence. (It was the first EVG post that attracted much attention outside some amazing die-hards.) 

The copy below is from the 2008 EVG post. You can read the full article via Curbed here.

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The piece begins in the early 1980s with the rotting hulk of the Christodora House on Avenue B at Ninth Street and the young man eager to own it, Harry Skydell. 

Skydell's enthusiasm was indeed mysterious. The sixteen-story building he wanted to buy, on Avenue B facing Tompkins Square Park, was surrounded by burned-out buildings that crawled with pushers and junkies. It was boarded up, ripped out, and flooded...Early in the seventies, the city had put up the Christodora up for auction and nobody bid. 

The building was eventually sold in 1975 for $62,500. (Last I saw, two-bedroom units there—roughly 1,100 square feet—averaged $1.6 million or so.) 

The article discusses the influx of chain stores, art galleries and "chic cafes."

"And real-estate values are exploding" as a result. Said one longtime resident on the changes: "I've lived in my rent-controlled apartment for years and pay $115 a month. I live on the Lower East Side. The young kids who just moved in upstairs and pay $700 a month for the same space — they live in the East Village."

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Here are a few images/pages from the cover story... the photo below is on 10th Street, steps west of Avenue B... 

New York magazine pays homage to the East Village with 'Tales From Little Ukraine'

Via the EVG inbox... 

New York magazine's annual "Yesteryear Issue" celebrates the magazine’s 54th anniversary by paying homage to the East Village's Little Ukraine. 

"The issue tells the neighborhood’s story through successive waves of immigration, and shows how the neighborhood retained its identity and culture," says features director Genevieve Smith. "These stories are told through a deeply reported history by city editor Christopher Bonanos, as well as first-person accounts and archival photographs and illustrations." 

And the cover? 

The cover features a painting by Yaroslava Surmach Mills (1925–2008), who grew up in the East Village (her father was the proprietor of Surma Book & Music Co.), attended Cooper Union, and became a well-known children's-book illustrator in the 1970s. 

You can find the issue here.

'There goes the neighborhood' — 30 years later

Just realized that this issue of New York magazine was on newsstands 30 years ago this week… so here's a look back at the issue via an EVG post from June 6, 2008 ...

That's the headline for the May 28, 1984, New York magazine cover story that I recently came across. The piece begins in the early 1980s with the rotting hulk of the Christodora and the young man eager to own it, Harry Skydell.

Skydell's enthusiasm was indeed mysterious. The sixteen-story building he wanted to buy, on Avenue B facing Tompkins Square Park, was surrounded by burned-out buildings that crawled with pushers and junkies. It was boarded up, ripped out, and flooded...Early in the seventies, the city had put up the Christodora up for auction and nobody bid.

The building was eventually sold in 1975 for $62,500. (Last I saw, two-bedroom units there — roughly 1,100 square feet — average $1.6 million or so. Of course, they're rarely available.)

The article talks about the influx of chain stores, art galleries and chic cafes. "And real-estate values are exploding" as a result. Said one longtime resident on the changes: "I've lived in my rent-controlled apartment for years and pay $115 a month. I live on the Lower East Side. The young kids who just moved in upstairs and pay $700 a month for the same space — they live in the East Village."

There are so many interesting passages in the article by Craig Unger that I'd end up excerpting the whole thing. So it's below. You can click on each image to read it. Meanwhile, what do you think would be the headline for this story today?

Celebrating 28 years of saying 'There goes the neighborhood'

We trot this one out every so often... It's the cover story from the May 28, 1984, New York magazine ... The article talks about the influx of chain stores, art galleries and chic cafes. "And real-estate values are exploding" as a result. Said one longtime resident on the changes: "I've lived in my rent-controlled apartment for years and pay $115 a month. I live on the Lower East Side. The young kids who just moved in upstairs and pay $700 a month for the same space — they live in the East Village."

Find the whole article here.

Another era, another lost city

Our friend Esquared posted an excerpt from the Dec. 21-28, 1987 issue of New York magazine. It's a cover story by Pete Hamill titled "The New York We’ve Lost."

Here are a few passages:

“It was a city, as John Cheever once wrote, that “was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.” In that city, the taxicabs were all Checkers, with ample room for your legs, and the drivers knew where Grand Central was and always helped with the luggage. ... In that city, you did not smoke on the subway. You wore galoshes in the rain. Waitresses called you honey. You slept with windows open to the summer night.

That New York is gone now, hammered into dust by time, progress, accident, and greed. Yes, most of us distrust the memory of how we lived here, not so very long ago. Nostalgia is a treacherous emotion, at once a curse against the present and an admission of permanent resentment, never to be wholly trusted. For many of us, looking back is simply too painful; we must confront the unanswerable question of how we let it all happen, how the Lost City was lost. And so most of us have trained ourselves to forget. …”

And!

I suppose that 30 years from now (as close to us as we are to 1958), when I've been safely tucked into the turf at the Green-Wood, someone will write in these pages about a Lost New York that includes Area and the Mudd Club and Nell's, David's Cookies and Aca Joe and Steve's ice cream. Someone might mourn Lever House or Trump Tower or the current version of Madison Square Garden. Anything is possible. But if so, I hope that at least one old and wizened New Yorker will reach for a pen and try to explain about our lost glories: and mention spaldeens and trolleys and — if he can make it clear, if he has the skill and the memory — even Willie Mays.

You can access the entire article through Nonetheless here.

East Village winners in the 'Best of New York'

East Village Man has compiled the East Village-related items from New York Magazine's "Best of New York" issue. There weren't actually many mentions ... here are a few...

RESTAURANTS

Best Bacon and Eggs - Peels (325 Bowery at 2nd St.)

“Plants Matter” section for best veggies:

Carrots - Dirt Candy (430 E. 9th st. at Ave A)

Escarole - Porsena (21 E. 7th st. near Cooper Square)

Check out the rest at EVM.

1914 redux

A reader passed this along from New York magazine... from last week's post.



Which reminds me that the Grieve copy has yet to arrive....

It's a black fly in your Chardonnay...It's a death row pardon two minutes too late

Thanks to New York magazine for including my Pirates of the Yunnibbean post in their Neighborhood Watch feature this week... (And thanks to EV Grieve reader Pinhead for the link...)

We're No. 10!

New York's cover story this week is on The Most Livable Neighborhoods in New York ... and it should provide plenty of discussion ... the editors have created this quantitative index (below) of the most satisfying places to live in... and the East Village finishes... No. 10! Here's there explanation:

The neighborhood with the highest concentration of bars in the city (if not the world) scores off the charts in all the expected areas: retail diversity, restaurant density, proximity to nightlife, and desirability to the creative classes, with only schools and affordability truly lacking. With a typical two-bedroom running at about $3,300 per month, it’s expensive. But thanks to nearby NYU, the East Village has more income and ethnic diversity than most of its neighbors.

So the East Village is No. 1 in bars/nightlife... and 49th out of 50 for housing cost? Surprised?

Overall, Park Slope is No. 1 while those LES upstarts (heh) are No. 2. Read the whole thing here.

New York's Neighborhood Watch

From this week's New York magazine:



Previously on EV Grieve:
Observations from last night's noisy bars meeting

For further reading:
Stop the SuperNoise - Community Meeting (Blah Blog Blah)

I want to go to the beach

From New York's interview with Iggy Pop:

You moved to Miami ten years ago, but for many you will always be the epitome of a New Yorker.
I’d been in the city twenty years straight, so it was just time for me to go, and Miami seemed far enough. Besides, you can get an egg cream in Miami, and I’m still able to be disgusted by the Post at the local newsstand.

Last year at this time on EV Grieve: The Lower East Side — There goes the neighborhood

That's the headline for the May 28, 1984, New York magazine cover story that I recently came across. The piece begins in the early 1980s with the rotting hulk of the Christodora and the young man eager to own it, Harry Skydell.

You can read the article here.

How the recession may change New York City

New York magazine's cover story this week is titled "Recession Culture." And it begins:

It’s a truism now that money was an engulfing, distorting force of the boom years, particularly in New York. At the level of urban development, it skewed our economy; at the level of culture, it misshaped values; at the level of individual behavior, it corrupted habits and discolored thoughts: This is your brain on money.

Time suckers: New York magazine on Google Books

As Ryan Tate reported on Gawker, New York is available now in the new magazine search on Google Books. Gawker highlights Barbara Goldsmith's classic "La Dolce Viva" article from April 29, 1968, that told of the seedy side of Andy Warhol's entourage. That same issue includes a feature on the growth of graffiti art in the city.

Anyway, I've just spent about an hour reading that issue. See you next week!

Nancy Spungen 30 years later

New York magazine has this feature this week:

The Day Punk Died
Thirty years ago this month, the death of Nancy (of Sid &) effectively ended New York’s early punk scene. It’s been easy to hate her since — maybe too easy

In the article, Karen Schoemer speaks with Legs McNeil, among others. She interviews him at the Yaffa Cafe. I love how the article ends:

Legs McNeil doesn’t live in New York City anymore. He bought a house in rural Pennsylvania and doesn’t relish his return visits. He’s now a recovered alcoholic wearing a black Hawaiian shirt decorated with pictures of exotic cocktails and pegged black jeans 30 years out of fashion. He wants his old New York. He glances at a girl in slutty Sex and the City clothes that aren’t slutty anymore, talking on her cell phone while her dining companion gazes patiently into space. The sight brings out a little of his old fire. “I don’t know who the fuck they’re talking to,” he sneers. “Are they talking to other people in restaurants eating breakfast?” Where’s Nancy when you need her? She would have hated it here. She wouldn’t have lasted a minute.

Here's the Sid and Nancy heroin interview from the punk documentary D.O.A.

Hogs and hoboes, gloom and doom

Catching up on this week's New York.

There's James Cramer's column:

What will New York look like a year from now? The answer: bad and probably worse, and perhaps downright catastrophic. Three degrees of awful.

And an interview with financial historian Niall Ferguson:

I’m in Venice now, which used to be a financial center and is now a tourist center. And the nightmare is that a crisis of this magnitude will turn New York from a financial center into a tourist center. The good news is that London seems to be handling this crisis slightly worse than New York. My sense is that the great financial crisis we’re living through will fundamentally tilt the balance of the world from West to East. Sovereign-wealth funds will matter much, much more because they’ve got the money and we haven’t. New York isn’t quite Venice yet, but I certainly am quite relieved that I don’t own a large block of real estate in Manhattan right now.

And there's a piece on that newish place on 7th Street between Avenue A and First Avenue that sells fancy sliced hog:

It fills the shop with a lovely aroma that wafts its way down the block, causing startled passersby to lift their noses and sniff the air like cartoon hoboes on the trail of a windowsill pie. Resistance is futile.

Unless you're a vegetarian.

Setting the record straight on Lou Reed

I picked up an item yesterday on Lou Reed from the City Room, which cited a Daily Star blurb about Lou Reed wanting a street named after him and all that. Anyway! What wasn't mentioned in any of this!: That item came from this week's action-packed 40th anniversary issue of New York. (Way to source it, Daily Star!)

I realized that last night when I continued my journey through the issue. The Reed stuff was part of the magazine's "New York Questionnaire."

25 years of yuppies

Lots to do and see in New York's 40th anniversary issue.

For instance, here's Jay McInerney in an essay he wrote titled "Yuppies in Eden"....He says he first heard the term "yuppie" in 1983 while having breakfast at Veselka. A painter he knew muttered "fucking yuppies" after seeing an Upper East Side-looking couple in chinos.

Not long after my first actual sighting, I would see the earliest DIE YUPPIE SCUM graffiti around the neighborhood, an epithet that was soon vying in popularity with that LES perennial EAT THE RICH. The vituperative tone with which the Y-word was pronounced on East Fifth Street was in part a function of rapidly escalating real-estate prices in the East Village; after decades of relative stability that had made the area a bastion of Eastern European immigrants and young bohemians, though, it’s easy to forget at this distance that it was also a war zone where muggings and rapes weren’t considered news. The Hells Angels ruled East Third Street, and after dark you went east of Second Avenue strictly at your own risk. The cops didn’t go there. East Tenth beyond Avenue A was a narcotics supermarket where preteen runners scampered in and out of bombed-out tenements. In fact, great swatches of the city were dirty and crime-ridden. Even the West Village was pretty gritty by today’s standards, and Times Square was a scene of spectacular squalor. Check out Taxi Driver or The French Connection if you want to get a sense of what this urban wasteland looked like.

And later...

My first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, came out in September 1984, although it was set a few years earlier, in a grubbier, less prosperous New York. No one was more surprised than me when The Wall Street Journal described me as a spokesman for the yuppies. The protagonist of the novel was a downwardly mobile fact-checker and aspiring novelist, and unless I’m mistaken, he didn’t eat any raw fish in the novel. His best friend, Tad Allagash, was a likelier yuppie, an adman with entrée to all the right places, an uptown boy who knew his way around downtown. And they both did a lot of coke, a.k.a. Bolivian Marching Powder, which was to become the emblematic drug of the eighties, what acid had been to the sixties.

More before-and-afters from New York magazine

I had a post yesterday morning on New York's jaw-dropper of a piece this week titled The Glass Stampede. Here are more before-and-after shots from the feature:


11 and 22 East 1st Street


Palladium Residence Hall on East 14th Street.


One Astor Place


Union Square West

Also! I was so delirious looking at all this that I missed the article's reference to "one" Jeremiah Moss on the first pass yesterday.

As Justin Davidson wrote:

In his 1962 poem “An Urban Convalescence,” James Merrill captured the feverish yet methodical sacking of the city and the way it toys with our sense of comfortable familiarity.

As usual in New York, everything is torn down
Before you have had time to care for it.
Head bowed, at the shrine of noise,
let me try to recall
What building stood here.
Was there a building at all?

Among Merrill’s disciples is one Jeremiah Moss, who maintains the engagingly gloomy blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, which he terms “an ongoing obituary for my dying city.” His topic is the steady erosion of the city’s texture. He is the defender of all the undistinguished hunks of masonry that lend the streets their rhythm and give people a place to live and earn a living: bodegas, curio stores, a metalworking shop in Soho, diners, and dingy bars.

"The city is sprouting a hard, glistening new shell of glass and steel"

There's a piece in the new New York magazine titled "The Glass Stampede." It begins:

Our city is molting.

Bricks flake away. So do brittle fire escapes, terra-cotta encrustations, old paint, cracked stoops, faded awnings, sash windows, and stone laurels fashioned a century ago by Sicilian carvers. New York is shucking off its aging walk-ups, its small and mildewed structures, its drafty warehouses, cramped stores, and idle factories. In their place, the city is sprouting a hard, glistening new shell of glass and steel. Bright, seamless towers with fast elevators and provisional views spring up over a street-level layer of banks and drugstores. In some cities, a building retains the right to exist until it’s proved irredeemable. Here, colossal towers are merely placeholders, temporary arrangements of future debris. New York lives by a philosophy of creative destruction. The only thing permanent about real estate is a measured patch of earth and the column of air above it. The rest is disposable.

And the metamorphosis has sped up. In the past fifteen fat years, more than 76,000 new buildings have gone up, more than 44,000 were razed, another 83,000 were radically renovated—a rate of change that evokes those time-lapse nature films in which flowers spring up and wither in a matter of seconds. For more than a decade, we have awakened to jackhammers and threaded our way around orange plastic netting, calculating that, since our last haircut, workers have added six more stories to that high-rise down the block. Now that metamorphosis is slowing as the economy drags. Buildings are still going up, but the boom is winding down. Before the next one begins is a good time to ask, has this ferment improved New York or eaten away at the city’s soul?