Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing 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: Henry Hills
Occupation: Filmmaker
Location: Tompkins Square Park
Time: Saturday, Nov. 26 at 2 p.m.

I grew up in Atlanta. I was in San Francisco for four years and I moved here in 1978 - 6th Street between A and B for the first year, and 9th between B and C for 6 months. My apartment was burglarized, I got mugged twice in the park, but I had a great apartment. Then I subletted a place in SoHo for six months, I lived on the first block of Ludlow for eight years and then I renovated a building on 8th Street with a group of people — an artists' building.

When I was here in the 1970s ... there were a lot of empty storefronts, especially on Avenue B, but most of the storefronts weren’t stores. There would be a lot of little artist spaces that would come and go. Ray’s was there of course. Leshko’s was there but I liked Odessa better. You could eat supper for about $2, and there was an old woman who knew the regulars, and she would always give you extra portions. The kitchen in my place was impossible to cook at home, plus you couldn’t possibly buy groceries and eat as cheap as Odessa’s or Leshko’s.

We started as a study group in 1981. We got a site in 1985, and we moved in 1988. I’ve been there ever since. It was an artist-housing program that the Koch administration had proposed. It was basically people who were being displaced from SoHo, and they were moving them to Forsyth Street, but the Community Board freaked out because they were giving low-cost housing money to relocate artists who were being pushed out of Tribeca to the Lower East Side.

I got an application, and it was clear that with the deadline you had to hire a development team to do this, so we formed a study group. We figured we were all college graduates – we’d figure out how to fill out this application ourselves. So we ... put in an application. It was defeated by the Community Board. We went and asked them to spell out exactly what they opposed, because they didn’t want to say they hated artists. They just didn’t want this funding for low-cost housing to go to middle-class artists. I mean, it wasn’t all middle class — none of us had any money, but most of us came from middle-class backgrounds.

I’m a filmmaker. I’ve always made short films. I show a lot at Anthology Film Archives on Second Avenue and Second Street. This filmmaker friend Peter Hutton died last summer, so people got some friends and former students of his to go out and shoot a camera roll in 16mm. I shot a camera roll of the Hare Krishna Tree as a memorial to Peter and showed it at Bard College a few weeks ago and out in Brooklyn two weeks ago. I was out shooting today. I’m just making a little short film on the Hare Krishna Tree for my wife Martina, who’s also a filmmaker.

I just finished a new film called HHHHH - my first 16:9 movie. All the images revolve around the letter H. It’s a kind of game planned to avoid narrative, but still make it entertaining and a lively movie. I made a movie called SSS, which is on YouTube. I shot it when I was renovating the building. It’s a dance movie, shot entirely on the street. I worked with a bunch of dancers, and if it was a sunny day I would just call them up and we’d find one of the gardens or some rubble-filled lot or something, and they would improvise movement. I composed this movie. You can really see the neighborhood during that time and also the 1980s clothing styles.

I love Tompkins Square Park. I come here and sit almost every day. I think it’s the nicest neighborhood in town – every block has a garden. It’s unbelievable. I live in the back, between two one-way streets, a dead end and the park, with a tree in the backyard and stuff. It’s very quiet.

When I moved from Ludlow Street I could not believe how quiet it was. Here there are lot of people in rent-control apartments, there are the buildings where the tenants took over or people renovated, and also there is a bunch of public housing. So when you walk in Tompkins Square Park you don’t feel like you’re in a neighborhood full of millionaires.

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

Out and About in the East Village (part 2)

In this ongoing 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: Eric Paulin
Occupation: Musician
Location: Tompkins Square Park
Time: Thursday, Nov. 3 at 6:30 p.m.

In part 1, Paulin, a native New Yorker, discussed coming to the East Village starting in the summer of 1968 to see shows at the Fillmore East.

I’ve been in my building since May of 1979, so I’m coming up on 38 years. I’ve had some bad experiences with a couple of bad landlords in this neighborhood who owned my building. When I moved in, there was a great and extremely interesting person who owned the building named Kent Cooper. He was an East Village hero in my opinion. He was a writer, and he owned a small record company. They recorded jazz, blues, avant-garde jazz and blues-rock. He ran the record company out of his apartment.

Everybody on the block respected Kent. He did a lot of people favors. Kent bought the building for an extremely good price in the early 1970s, and he was actually struggling at the time. It was a lot of money for him; he had to take out a bank loan, and he worked tooth and nail to keep that building going. He would do repairs himself, and he did whatever he could.

If tenants were late on rent, he would give them a break. He would let me work off rent sometimes by doing superintendent duties, or by helping him and a couple contractors do work. He had a big heart, especially for creative people who were struggling or having a hard time — who weren’t using drugs, weren’t drinking ... who were just basically trying to fight the good fight with their creative pursuits.

Unfortunately, Kent sold the building in February 1987 to an extremely bad landlord. They started a renovation process in the building that should have taken six months or less. It was basically a gut renovation of 10 units and there was myself and another older gentlemen in the building. The renovation ended up taking 13 or 14 months, and the owners and contractors put myself and the older tenant through a living hell.

I was in housing court with them from mid-summer of 1988 until late fall of 1991. Because I was a freelance musician, I would do a gig, get home sometimes at 2 or 3 in the morning, sleep for a few hours, and then put on a shirt and tie and go to housing court with my documents, my HPD reports and my photographs. I was very organized. The whole thing was an excruciating process.

We were able to withhold our rent and put it in an escrow account, which the judge approved. In the end, I ended up winning the case, and I got what they called a landmark decision against my landlord, which was a decision in a court of law where that combination of elements had never come together to form that kind of case, therefore getting a certain decision on that case. Because it was a pretty cut-and-dry matter, it should have been solved in a few months, but because the landlord was dragging out and was not showing up to court and was constantly lying and trying to deceive the court and even their own lawyer about what happened.

In the spring of 1991, the building went into receivership because they weren’t paying the bank. So they weren’t paying their bank; they weren’t paying their lawyer; and they also weren’t paying their contractors who worked in the building.

So I won my court case, but about a year and a half later, I was in court with the next landlord, who actually turned out to be a very decent landlord, and a much better landlord than some others. We resolved that case out of mutual consent, and we were able to work it out between us without any problems. They offered me money to leave. It seemed like a lot of money at the time, and it especially would have been to a lot of lower income or struggling people, who might have taken the buyout. But I didn’t do it, because I thought to myself, I love New York, and if I leave, there’s no way I’ll be able to come back and be able to afford to live here.

My first experiences playing music in Tompkins Square Park go back to 1981. The park was dangerous and there was a lot of crime. I would walk through here because I knew how to handle myself in the neighborhood, and because people knew me, but the drug dealers were using a lot of homeless people to help them sell drugs or whatever. We used to play different places in the park, me and three or four of my jazz buddies. I think people appreciate that there’s jazz in Tompkins Square Park, where all these great jazz musicians lived in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

In those days, we actually used to do very well busking. We used to busk in Washington Square Park in the late 1970s with a jazz quartet and jazz quintet. We were one of the first groups to do it. In those days, I could just go on forever busking, and you could actually make very decent money busking in the late 1970s and early 1980s, because you didn’t have a lot of laws.

Today, we have a permit with the MTA, the Music Under New York Program, and when we don’t have a gig, we can been seen playing in the subway once or twice a week, where I also play with my jazz quartet. We play usually either on Friday or Saturday night, usually at 34th Street and 6th Avenue or Times Square.

My wife is also in the group, which is named The Meetles. We started from a meet-up group where we would talk about the Beatles. We specialize in classic rock ... and it’s nice to bring that to the East Village, because a lot of that was born and developed because of the Fillmore East and all of these great clubs all up and down St. Mark's Place.

In the end, I hope that the East Village and all neighborhoods like the East Village retain their original character and identity. I love walking up and down the streets in New York and seeing the old buildings that have been up for 120 years. I love Tompkins Square Park. I love the old architecture. I love the old timers who have interesting stories to tell. I love the creative people and the interesting people.

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

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing 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: Eric Paulin
Occupation: Musician
Location: Tompkins Square Park
Time: Thursday, Nov. 3 at 6:30 p.m.

I’ve been coming down here a really long time, almost 50 years. I was born in the West Village. A few months after I was born, my parents moved to the Upper West Side, and we lived there until 1964, but at that time there was a lot of really bad crime coming down from Harlem, mostly related to drugs, so we moved to Forest Hills.

I’m a musician. I’m a drummer. My parents weren’t musicians, but they were very creative people. My mother was an abstract painter in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and my father was a photographer and artist. They were taking me to art galleries, to live concerts, to photographic exhibits, and to museums when I was 3 or 4 years old, in the late 1950s. My mother and father were very big on exposing us to that.

I moved into the East Village, down a block from here, in May 1979. I’m very appreciative of being able to live in a neighborhood like the East Village. I was playing a lot of gigs, rehearsals, and sessions down here, and I was very attracted to the modern jazz movement.

When I was in my late teens, I started to study and hang out with jazz musicians more, and that’s what got me into it. I appreciated all the people here. I had a lot of knowledge and history of this neighborhood, of the great jazz musicians, because I was always reading and asking questions to people who were a lot older than me.

The thing is that even after Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus lived down here in the 1950s because there were so many places to play, you had a lot of great musicians who recorded for Blue Note Records, Riverside Records, Prestige Records, Debut Jazz Records ... They were living down here because of the low rent and the opportunity. Their next-door neighbor was a guy they just did a record with for Blue Note Records in New Jersey a week before; the guy across the street is the new drummer who just came to town; the woman downstairs was a dancer; the guy above you was a poet. You were around all these creative people. This is the embodiment of the East Village for me.

My first experiences in the East Village were in the summer of 1968 at the Fillmore East. I was coming into Manhattan a lot with my older brother or my mother to see shows. People talk about the East Village being rough in the ‘80s and ‘90s. They have no idea how rough it was – it was very dangerous in the ‘60s. If you stood out and you looked like you had money or were an affluent person of any kind, you were targeted.

I have a lot of stories about seeing things in the street, scary stories about friends of mine coming here to buy records or see music or do creative things, who were hassled or physically accosted. Fortunately, none of that ever happened to me, but I saw a lot of music down here from ’68 until the Fillmore East closed in ’71.

I had a couple interesting experiences with the late, great promoter Bill Graham. I would see Bill quite a bit when I was either here to see a show or I would come early in the morning to get a concert ticket before I went to school.

He was a very tough guy, but he did a lot for music all over the world. He exposed a lot of people who went to the Fillmore East to great music... not just the classic rock and blues rock of that time, but he would also have, for instance, the Grateful Dead with Miles Davis opening for them, or some other rock group with the great Rahsaan Roland Kirk Quartet opening for them.

There are a lot of stories about Bill, but I have a lot of respect for what he did. He also did a lot for the neighborhood. He wasn’t just a concert promoter who made money and got in a limousine and went back to his townhouse. He cared about the neighborhood. The Fillmore East did a lot to keep us safe and to keep it clean, and he had a lot of pride in what he did. He was a good human being, but if you crossed him or if he thought you were being disrespectful to him, he could really let you have it.

There was a very organic and open feeling about the neighborhood. You could meet interesting people in a coffee shop or on the street. I would be walking down the street with my cymbal bag and my snare drum on the way to a gig, and a guy would stop me and say, ‘Oh, you’re a drummer, yeah my wife and I knew Charlie Parker in the early 1950s,’ and you end up talking for 10 or 15 minutes.

For me [this neighborhood] was part of the whole picture. It was not only that they were such great musicians, but it was where they were living, and what their life experiences were at that time. I appreciate being able to live in a neighborhood like this.

In part 2 next week, Eric talks about busking in Washington Square Park in the late 1970s, playing in Tompkins Square Park in the 1980s, and loving the neighborhood today.

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

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing 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: Candice Brewer
Occupation: Pharmacist
Location: Avenue A, between 2nd and 3rd
Time: 3:30 on Monday, Oct. 31

I sell drugs for a living. I’m a pharmacist. I’m an Army brat, so I’m from all over the place.

I moved here in 1978, I’ve lived on 7th Street and 11th Street, and then I moved down to below Houston Street in 1986. Everybody I knew lived down here. Affordability brought me here too, because it was a real dangerous neighborhood. I certainly didn’t go to the lettered avenues. That was way too scary, and there were blocks that I wouldn’t even walk during the day. They were too deserted.

If you ever looked at some of the old photographs, you’ll see that there was nothing going on. The buildings were burned out; the cars were trashed. I would walk home in the middle of the street, because people could come out from between the junked cars and places like that. I had the keys in my hand, and always checking before you opened your door so somebody wasn’t behind you. I’ve come out of my house and seen the police going, ‘Freeze!’ And I’ve seen busts where they’ve knocked down doors… and all the helicopters. Now I’m the scariest thing on Avenue C.

Like all of Ludlow Street, Orchard Street went dark at 5. It was all fabric stores and a lot of it was gravestone stores. The Mercury Lounge was a store for gravestones and you got free parking for a half an hour — you know, cause you could make that decision in half an hour. You can see along Suffolk Street, there are still some of the hoists and tackles on some of the old buildings, so they could pull the gravestones in to do the carving.

I love the music scene. You’d see a lot of interesting people, and there were a lot of artists living around here. There used to be such good clubs around here. It was really a fun time. The Ludlow Street Café, which doesn’t get a lot of press anymore, was the first bar on Ludlow Street, and that was like our living room. I think that came in around 1985, maybe even before Max Fish I believe. We would have parties there, Christmas parties, and birthday parties. It really was our community center – our country store so to speak.

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

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing 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: Grant Stitt
Occupation: Psychotherapist
Location: Tompkins Square Park
Time: 11:45am on Tuesday, Oct 11th

I’ve been here since the early 1980s. I was born in New Zealand, and I went to Canada on a graduate degree scholarship when I was a young man and dropped out of a Ph.D. program and came to New York City. I originally lived on 1st Avenue and 9th Street.

It was completely like a foreign culture. Canada was very restrained, like where I grew up, and New York City was very exuberant and brash. It took me a year, at least, to find a voice loud enough to be part of it. It was a bit of a culture clash almost, even though we both spoke English.

Everyone had aspirations; they were aspiring dancers, or models, or singers, or actors — or something like that. They were very self-centered in a way. It was hard to break through to them, so I didn’t really pick up friends from there, but eventually I picked up friends from other places.

I had sort of clubby friends, and one of them was Ann Magnuson. She moved to Avenue A around this time in the early 80s, and that was considered radical. I moved across the park to Avenue B, and it wasn’t safe, but nothing happened to me. My partner got stabbed once. Someone stole his backpack and then stabbed him in the back. I was always a little bit cautious, but I was never that worried.

One of my first friends in New York City who is a friend today, he and his brother opened a nightclub in the 1980s called Area. These were the days where sort of anything went. After work I would go there. It was very exciting. I was not a drug taker like everybody else but that didn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy myself.

At the time, I worked in restaurants like everybody else. Like a lot of people who dropped out of Ph.D. programs in the 1970s, I ended up cooking for a living. I had my own restaurant called the New Nile. A Spanish friend of ours did a huge magical mural on the inside. The restaurant that I owned was one of the originals in Tribeca, down on Warren Street in the City Hall area. It was open at night, and there was only one restaurant down there — the Odeon.

There was only one condominium that was residential in that neighborhood and it was across the street, and so we had neighbors and friends at first, but because we were close to City Hall our business was stronger at lunch than it was in the evenings. I wouldn’t say it was a financially a hugely successful place, but socially it was pretty great. It was very fun. Then I went back to school, and now I have a psychotherapy practice.

I’m still very fond of the East Village, and I like the fact that I can go to a concert or a play, and I can come back at 11 pm and still have dinner. I think something similar about the neighborhood then and now is the diversity. We have a very diverse community. People have been living there for as long as I have, and there are new ones. I don’t mind the students.

The strange thing is that my building is sort of a micro-perspective of the neighborhood — it changed extraordinarily. I live over on Avenue B and 9th Street with my partner of 30 years, and there are a few oldsters in the building, but the majority of the apartments have been renovated and they’re [full of] NYU students. You get a contact high as you walk up to your apartment, and they’re paying five times the amount that I am.

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

Out and About in the East Village

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: Michelle Candela
Occupation: Writer / Artist
Location: Tompkins Square Park
Time: 2:30 on Friday, Oct. 7

Originally, I’m from Philadelphia, but my father’s side of the family are all from here. I moved to New York in 1985, then I left in 1995, and I came back in 2005.

I used to work in animation. I write. I’m trying to write a couple screenplays. I did act for awhile. I was a librarian. It was one of the best times of my life here. I lived on Avenue B between 4th and 5th.

As a matter of fact, I come down here every now and then to recharge my batteries. I came today to see some friends of mine down the street on Avenue A. I just like coming in and walking around.

Avenue B was nothing like it is now. There was garbage everywhere, which I didn’t mind. There were lots of bodegas and small little shops, which really weren’t much. There’s the Horseshoe bar, which is a great bar on B. On the corner of 7th and A was King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, then there was 7A Café, which is now Ms. Lily’s, and then across the way was Leshko’s. That was a Polish coffee shop, and it was the first time I ever had kielbasas and pierogies. Next door to King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut was Sal’s Pizzeria, which was where I found my kitten, who I had for 18 years. She was a little black cat and she was so adorable. I named her Zia. So I got her right there and I fell in love with her.

New York, and especially down here… you never had to worry about who you were. It was unpretentious. It was just life. When you came over here you could just be yourself. It didn’t matter what walk of life you came from. It was where all the misfits congregated.

You can still see it now. There are a lot of really cool people here. The feel and the community was just awesome. It was down to earth. It was just life. People were cool. Whether they had a bad attitude or a good attitude, it didn’t matter, because it just fit into the neighborhood and you understood it. Everybody understood each other.

My philosophy is: Be who you are; have a great time; everybody is awesome.

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

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing 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: Jamey Poole and Rusty James
Occupation: “Being a New Yorker”
Location: 6th Street and 1st Avenue
Time: 3:45 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 1

I’m from Texas originally. I’ve been in the East Village for 20 years. Art school brought me here. I went to Parsons. I went to school for photography and I work for a photographer now. And life in the city was so intoxicating that I couldn’t leave. I came directly here. It was the only neighborhood I would ever want to live in when I moved here in 1996. It was the history of the place, the creativity, the kind of people it attracted, the whole environment – all of it. There was no question about it.

It was all of downtown. It was very vibrant. Everybody you wanted to know or make friends with or do any kind of creative projects with lived between 23rd Street and Canal and river to river basically. You’d walk outside your door and meet all kinds of cool people, start a band, start a magazine, start a gallery, do an art collective — whatever. It was very concentrated.

Even though I love visiting all my friends in Bushwick or in Jersey or in Astoria, it’s like the creative nucleus has really been blown apart. So it’s hard, you know. If you’re like 22 and you move to the city now, you start a band and your keyboardist lives in Sunset Park, your singer’s in Jersey City, the drummer lives up in Washington Heights. So it’s really hard to have that creative community. I miss that. I’m not [complaining] but I do miss that. I miss having the creative concentration of everybody in one general area. It’s not too easy to go over and have dinner. It’s a whole production.

I mean it’s not like it’s not happening. It is happening. The drag scene in Bushwick is off the chain. It’s really amazing. There’s tons of cool stuff around Bushwick, but that shit is fucking far from where I live. My friend lives in Bushwick and it takes me an hour and a half to get there.

It’s just that the East Village had more time to really blossom. Williamsburg, that whole thing happened within a decade. The immigrants, the artists, the students, the money, that wave happened so quickly — 10 or 15 years in Williamsburg. So nothing took root that well, whereas in the East Village there were decades and decades for that kind of creative spirit, and so you could feel it. You could feel the character of the place, and you don’t feel that in Williamsburg. The artistic time that happened there came and went like that. I still love it. I have tons of friends who live over there and I love hanging out in Williamsburg, but it doesn’t have the deep roots.

I’m going to Asbury Park to the Zombie Walk. I love Asbury Park. The Zombie Walk is really cool. It’s been going on for around 10 years. I went last year for the first time. They start at the convention center, walk down the boardwalk, then on Main Street, and there are all these parties. Asbury Park is where it’s at. It seems a little early to dress up but whatever.

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

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing 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: Boris Ryback
Occupation: Retired plumber
Location: First Avenue and Fifth Street
Time: 3 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 26

I’ve been here since the 1950s. I grew up here. These [Village View buildings] were all brownstones. This building came up in the 1960s. There was only one park, Tompkins Square Park and that was it.

I lived between Avenue B and C on 7th Street originally, and then we moved to 5th between Avenue A and B. When I grew up on Avenue C, everything was pushcarts. The only thing that did not come off a pushcart was the milk, which was sold in the store. Eggs and everything else came from a farm. There was a farmer who would come around and you would buy the eggs from him ... about once a week.

You stayed within your own neighborhood. You did not go out of your neighborhood. You had to belong in a group in your neighborhood – same ethnicity. Then you made alliances with other groups in order to move around. You had to stay within your own group or you’d get rearranged. I went to St. George’s. A lot of my friends went to St. Stan’s, and more went to St. Brigid’s. The only place we went to every once in awhile was over to 7th Street to McSorley’s. That’s about it. Nothing’s changed. It only got filthier.

I enjoyed it. There were no problems. You had more freedoms when you were a kid then you have now. There are more rules now. Then the yuppies moved in. When they moved in, the price of rent went up. My parents were living on 7th Street between Avenue B and C. They were paying for a cold-water flat, $35 a month rent. The toilet was out in the hallway. The bathtub was in the kitchen. The building had no heat. You had to generate your own heat. When you went to the bathroom, you went quickly.

It stayed the same [in the 1970s and 1980s]. The ones that were gonna die, died, and the ones that were not gonna die were not gonna die, no matter what you did. Most of my friends became cops. A lot of them became sanitation men. A lot of us became plumbers. You looked for a job that made the most money, other than having to shoot somebody. I was a plumber in New York for a long period of time, then I moved to New Jersey, and I stayed. [He was visiting family who lives in Village View.] I just retired out of Rutgers University after being there for 23 years as a plumber.

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

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing 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: Amy Sheridan
Occupation: Owner of digital marketing company
Location: Second Street and Avenue A
Time: 4:15 on Thursday, Sept. 8

I grew up in New Jersey. I moved here seven years ago. It’s funny, when I was 17 years old, the day I got my Driver's License, I drove and parked in front of where I'd end up living on Avenue A so many years later.

I live here for a reason. Besides the banks, there are no real chains right around here. That kind of stuff is such a bummer. When I look out of my window, there’s nothing like that. That’s why I live here. It’s all local businesses. I just liked the funkiness of the neighborhood. We have pretty much have everything you could possibly need without having to go to big-box stores or one store for everything. I heard they’re building a Target on 14th. Do we really need that? There’s every single thing here. Why do people have to buy from Amazon? It’s great that we have Amazon, but I just don’t think that should be the only thing we have. There’s something so fundamental about a bookstore.

Everyone in the neighborhood is awesome. It’s a real neighborhood. I treat everybody the same. There are a lot of people who don’t have housing here. I have dogs, and I walk around the block multiple times a day with the dogs. I don’t classify whether someone is living on the street or whether they are living in an apartment. They are people and I treat them like that. It’s cool to know everybody by their first names, whether it’s the priest, the people on the street or the guys in Native Bean. You really know people and I like that. [People] should think of the way it was before us. They’ve been here for so long.

I own an Internet company. It’s our 10-year anniversary next week. I didn’t even have email when I was in college. I learned it all on the job. I started my business with $1,000 and I made the the Inc. 5000 List of America's Fastest-Growing Companies. I do performance-based marketing. I work with advertisers like the U.S. Air Force for the VA hospital. I staff the doctors, nurses, dentists, things like that using LinkedIn and other job sites for the VA Hospital and Hospital for Special Surgery.

I’m also a huge Grateful Dead fan. I still follow the remaining members in the Grateful Dead. The first place they played in New York City was in 1967 in Tompkins Square Park. Pretty cool, right? I’ve been trying to find that flier for many years. One day I will.

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

Out and About in the East Village

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: Hal Hirshorn
Occupation: Artist
Location: St. Mark's Place and Avenue A
Time: 3:15 on Monday, Aug. 29

I came here after college in my early 20s. Oh you know, everybody comes to New York and there was a lot going on then. It was the tail end of the 1980s art scene. I just missed the East Village art boom. I got here in the summer of 1989 and by then most of the galleries moved to SoHo. I lived in the West Village because at that time there were apartments that were slightly cheaper than the East Village. Otherwise, I would have gone East Village. Everybody had talked about how the East Village had been priced out, but that’s nothing in comparison to today.

I’m a painter and a photographer. My studio is in Brooklyn now. I do oil painting, these strange abstractions that are a cross between landscape and abstract paintings — imaginary landscapes. There’s always been a back and forth between the two from the beginning of landscape paintings that were considered abstract paintings.

It’s been up and down, but I managed to hold things together somehow. The art world is doing well right now, so I’m OK. I have some people who work with me in terms of dealing and stuff like that. But that’s changing too and now everything in Chelsea is coming back to the Bowery and Lower East Side, but not the East Village.

Basically within a five-minute walk [today] most of the East Village that I’ve known over the course of 25, almost 30 years is gone, just gone, not like in bits and pieces, shifting here and there — just one fell swoop. Just to see everything radically redeveloped is what’s so stunning, because it used to happen in bits and pieces as the real estate went up. Now they’re doing blocks instead of buildings.

Bloomberg in his third term gave away much of the city to developers under the table. De Blasio seemed really great. I don’t know whether he’s had his hands too full or maybe he’s not as left as he said he is, but… he’s become very nebulous. But before de Blasio, you had other people like Mark Green running against Giuliani or I forget who ran against Bloomberg, but these guys didn’t stand a chance. They were just crushed.

Giuliani was real estate friendly, lets say, but he wasn’t like a real estate mogul. I think what we’re seeing right now is just a direct result of Bloomberg. He’s treated the city as though it were the Bloomberg Corporation’s property and his to sign off and sell away.

There was a rent stabilization law that was trying to cut back on rent stabilization and rent control, and they came up with a figure where anything above $2,500 was considered luxury housing. In those days, if you were able to afford an apartment that was that much money, you were pretty well off. Now that’s like kids out of college or crazy situations where you have four people living in apartments.

It’s almost reverting back to the tenement-like density and that’s just a result of the rent, unless you’re well off enough to be able to have over $25,000 a year to spend a year on rent. But the whole thing of the $2,500 figure is that is where the regulation was cut off, so now real estate, a lot of which was protected has effectively become market rate, and then the only thing that can change that is some big downturn or catastrophic event.

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

Out and About in the East Village

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: Craig
Occupation: Musician/Graphic Designer
Location: 9th Street
Time: 4:15 on Monday, Aug 22

I was born in Queens, but I’ve been here in this neighborhood since 1976. A lot of my friends lived here, and it was the East Village. It was a lot different than this. People didn’t east go beyond First or Second Avenue.

It was like not living in the city, because it was so desolate. It was very empty, because a lot of stuff beyond Avenue B was all abandoned. It was like a quiet neighborhood with hardly any people. I thought it was nice. The occasional gunshot; that was it.

I’ve lived in at least eight or nine different places in this neighborhood, uptown, on the west side. I’ve been all over the place, but mainly here. I mostly lived in storefronts because I liked having a backyard, but it wasn’t cheap so much. It was cheaper than other places, but it wasn’t exactly cheap. I think right about then, you could get a walkthrough for $75 a month before 1975, but then all of a sudden the prices just went up.

There were so many little clubs around here, especially the Puerto Rican social clubs, but they’re all gone now. There were so many of them, little bars... There was all sorts of little stuff around here. Sometimes they were open for a week; sometimes they were open for a couple months, but that was it.

I was a graphic designer, artist, musician — stuff like that. I started out in publishing. I was a graphic designer and then after about 10 years I went into advertising and then stayed in that for 10 to 15 years, but I didn’t really like that. So now I’m just hanging around. I had always been a musician since high school. I went to school for music. I play guitar and I used to play violin but I haven’t played that in years. I played in miscellaneous bands.

I don’t think anyone actually thought anything important was happening around here. We were just trying to survive and have fun. There was all sorts of stuff going on at the time, and I think people didn’t really have to stick to one thing to make a living. Now it’s just suburban. Once I saw all these people having kids here, I knew the neighborhood was gone. I guess that was around 1988 or 1991.

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

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing 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: John Von Hartz
Occupation: Writer
Location: 2nd Street between 1st Avenue and 2nd Avenue
Time: 11:15 on Tuesday, Aug 16

We moved to the East Village in 1965, and everybody thought we were crazy. We were, because it was really tough down here – a very heavy welfare, drug area, but it was all we could afford.

I was a writer, and once you’re a writer you’re always a writer. I worked for Time Life Books for years, the hard cover books about art, science, boating, anything. It was very interesting, and I got paid and paid fairly well for the time. It was like getting paid for a graduate program. Then I freelanced. Kathy, my wife, is an ace teacher. She teaches English as a second language. So we strung along somehow.

We discovered very quickly that you could buy brownstones for a reasonable amount of money, and the idea that you could own a brownstone in Manhattan seemed inconceivable for our socio-economic level, but we found one for what boiled down to $19,000 for three floors.

We lived in two of the floors and rented out the top one. We struggled with that for six or eight years, especially because we didn’t know that much, but we would hire people, we would watch what they did, and we would try to do it ourselves. We got pretty good at tiling and plumbing. We learned that if you can take care of a three-story brownstone, you can probably take care of the Empire State Building, because it’s all pretty much the same. There’s a plumbing core and an electrical core. It’s just segmented out. Just with the Empire State Building, there’s more of it, but the basics are the same.

So we grew confident that way, and then finally the area just got to be too noisy and too crazy for us, so we found a house. It was five stories, with ten apartments, a front and back apartment on each floor, and it was $64,000, which we couldn’t afford. But we figured we’d try it and see if it worked out. Turned out it did, but we went through very difficult times with it.

The main thing was that it was a working-class neighborhood, and so it had its ups and downs depending on what was happening on the street. Then in the 1980s, or late 1970s, the druggies started moving in. We would have to go out after dinner many nights. Somebody would come around, the word would go around, there would be a line formed behind him, the drugs would mysteriously appear from a runner on a bicycle, get handed out, and the users would disappear as quickly as they had formed, so it was very hard for the cops to catch them.

I would primarily go out, because we couldn’t get Kathy killed, and I’d just say, ‘Look we don’t want this. This is a family block here. We don’t want any trouble. Just stay away and we’ll all live happily ever after.’ They’d say, ‘We don’t want any trouble either.’ By god it worked. It took a long time and we worked with the police. We did a lot of things, but at that time the police, I won’t say they were in on it totally, but they were a lot more in on it then they were not in on it. The city was awash with drug money, and the whole area east of Avenue A was [filled with] abandoned buildings and drug-selling centers. Limousines were pulling up with UN plates on them with kids running out from the limousines to get the drugs for the diplomats. It was just a scene from a bad movie.

In time, [our street] settled down, and then we started seeing a terrific gentrification in the late 1990s maybe, which some of that was okay, but it just got… typical New York, there’s no middle ground. It’s all or nothing.

A lot of the characters on the streets have been forced out by the high rents. Our building was able to get higher rents, but that wasn’t really the point. We were surviving. We wanted artists and writers and other people to be able to live down here. Our interest wasn’t in real estate. We just happened to be people who had to live in New York and lucked into a building.

But I have to say this, and I say this every time I till this story – we didn’t know what would happen when we bought our building in 1973. The city was going broke, the middle class was abandoning it, the federal government and Ford had said drop dead to New York. We put everything we had into that building and we could have so easily been wiped out. I’m not talking about trying to make a fortune, I’m talking about just being destroyed, wiped out. We were very lucky. We rolled the dice and won that way. Nobody knew what would happen, or if they knew they weren’t willing to take the chance.

Now this is like a regular upper-middle-class neighborhood with fancy cars on the street. I couldn’t have imagined it. Cars were just fair game when we were first here. Tires were stolen or slashed, windows broken, radios stolen. It was a different ballgame.

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

4 years of Out and About in the East Village

On Aug. 1, 2012, we debuted a feature here titled Out and About in the East Village. Our first interview was with Mike Stupin, who worked making deliveries for (the now-closed) Mama’s Food Shop on East Third Street.

Delivering to pantsless people is very common. It’s not just guys; it’s everyone, all the time. People of every shape and size answer their door pantsless. Every once in awhile they get embarrassed and apologize and I’m like, ‘don’t worry about it.’ It’s kind of what I do, I put on pants so you don’t have to. Strangers love that joke. I’ve got one customer that I’ve never, ever seen wearing clothes. She’s always in a towel or a bathrobe. It doesn’t matter the time of day.

And here we are some 150 people later.

So many thanks to East Village-based photographer James Maher for his ongoing work on this series. (And thank you to Stacie Joy for filling in several times through the years.) And thank you to everyone who has taken the time to share his or her story.

You can revisit every interview here by year...

• 2012

• 2013

• 2014

• 2015

• the first quarter of 2016

And we were very sorry to hear about musician Bill Gerstel, who we featured in April 2014. He is facing a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. We wish Bill and his family all the best.

Out and About in the East Village

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: Creaux
Occupation: Waiter, VBar St. Mark's Place
Location: 9th Street and First Avenue
Time: 1:30 p.m. on Monday, July 25th

I’ve pretty much worked and lived in this neighborhood for a total of 11 years. I’m originally from New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina brought me here.

When I first got here, I was in a hotel in Queens for three months, and then I ended up getting a job at DBA down the street. I worked there for eight years. I lived in Williamsburg for three years, and then I finally moved over to First Avenue, right next to DBA, and ended up moving around the corner. I’ve been living here for about six years.

The neighborhood reminded me of the French Quarter. I feel a kinship toward this place because it reminds me of home, there being a variety of people. For instance, I feel the difference between the East Village versus the Upper West Side, is on the same block you can see a guy with an eight-inch mohawk, a guy like myself, and a guy in a business suit, and all three of us are living here. Whereas if you go to the Upper West side, you may see some of those people, you might see a guy like me or a guy with an eight-inch mohawk, but we’re probably working there; we’re not living there. Whereas, there really is a melting pot in the East Village. I like that. I like being around different types of people. I love different cultures. I love to get to know people.

Right now I work at VBar. I’m a waiter over there. When it comes to restaurant work, you’ve got to like people to do it. Waiting tables, as much as people might think that it’s an easy job, it can be frustrating. You’ve got to be able to deal with people. It’s easier to appease someone who’s drinking versus food. Food is harder to appease someone. People walk in cranky already because they’re really hungry. There’s a lot of nuance, because you have to give them a lot of attention and satisfy their needs.

We tend to attract a lot of Europeans; I meet so many. Yesterday I had a German guy ... and a young lady from the Czech Republic. I guess because we have a very European café décor about us, it tends to attract Europeans to us. The owner is Italian, from Sardinia.

One thing I like about this neighborhood also is that you kind of get to know your neighbors. It becomes a personable thing. I was just talking with some guy last night about how when you live and work in the same neighborhood, your familiarity becomes a lot deeper and you build more lasting friendships.

I had this friend of mine who died, who lived next door to DBA when I worked over there. The most I knew about him is that he was a playwright. We never hung outside of work, besides when our paths would cross, but in the time I spent with him drinking at the bar with me, I felt I really got to know who he was, even if it was only for a couple hours in a day. This is my neighborhood. I’m part of this. I feel it.

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

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing 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: Anna Pastoressa
Occupation: Jack of all trades
Location: 2nd Street and Avenue A
Time: 4:15 pm on Friday, July 15

I was born in Rome. As a young person, I thought that I was in a small world, and I wanted to see the world. So I used to travel a lot, and then I decided I wanted to come and visit the U.S. It was just a visit.

When I came, I liked it, and I traveled all over the U.S. I decided that I wanted to try to stay, but New York was not my first destination. I lived in New Orleans, I met somebody there, and I got married. That’s what made me stay here in this country. Eventually, I divorced that person and I decided to come to New York. I’m from Rome and I needed to be in a big city. New Orleans had a small-town feeling.

I moved here in 1983. I came right to the East Village. I used to live on Avenue C. It was the cheapest place to be, but it was also a dangerous area. It was like the wild west, but I have to say, the drug dealers who were in charge of the neighborhood, they kept the neighborhood safe. I used to walk around Alphabet City in the 80s by myself, at night. I knew the drug dealers would be in the doorways minding their business, and making sure that the neighborhood stayed safe.

You know, I felt safe, as crazy as this sounds. It was very hard to take a cab home, because cab drivers used to drop me on 1st Avenue. They’d said, ‘You have to walk. I’m not taking you to that jungle.’ I would be mad, because I wanted to go home, but they would systematically drop me on 1st Avenue, and I would have to walk all the way to Avenue C. But then I thought, ‘Okay, from 1st Avenue to Avenue C, there are going to be the drug dealers helping out.

In fact, there were some people who were pickpocketed, and the drug dealers were the ones who saved them, or they would chase the thief. They used to tell them, ‘Do not rob in this neighborhood. Do not come here to steal, because we will beat you up. We don’t want the cops here, so you don’t do this in this neighborhood.’

I knew the drug dealers, to the point where I had an old funky car, and I used to park it around the neighborhood. One time, the car got broken into. They broke the glass, and one of the drug dealers saw the car and said, ‘What happened to it?’ I said, ‘Well, look, they broke into the car, and I don’t even have a radio. There is nothing to steal.’ And he said, ‘Where did you park it?’ I said, ‘I parked it two blocks away,’ and he said, ‘You don’t park it there. You park your car on this block and nothing will ever happen to your car.’

I remember having a little trouble sometimes with kids in the neighborhood. They would play basketball and bounce it on my car, or be a little rowdy. There was one particular kid, I was trying to park the car near my house, and he was trying to take over the parking spot and put his ball there. So one time I wanted to park there, and he started bouncing the basketball on my car, and bent it.

I got so upset that I went to the drug dealer, and I said, ‘Listen, you told me to ask you for help. Please help me, this kid is not being nice to me. I know the kid, he lives right there, a few doors down from me.’ The drug dealer took care of it. He brought him to me and said, ‘You say sorry to this lady. Don’t you ever, ever bother her again,’ and the kid was like, ‘Sorry!’ I felt so bad for him.

The funny thing is that I saw him growing up after that, and he turned into a very nice man. To date, when I run into him, we laugh. He keeps telling me, ‘I’m so sorry for what I did as a kid,’ and I say, ‘Stop it. A long time has gone by. You’re a wonderful, nice young man. Leave it alone. You were a kid.’ We still laugh. We can never forget that incident.

I had a lot of friends in my neighborhood. We were all artists, musicians. I know a lot of people here who are into visual arts, music, theater. We used get together and Tompkins Square Park was our playground; that was our meeting point. We would go together to plays. There used to be a lot of alternative theaters in this area. People had theaters in their homes, and they had galleries in squats. It was a very nice period. As much as it was considered bad, or it had a negative connotation, I think it was a fun time of New York City, and of this area. There was a lot of freedom. We knew everybody. It was like being in a village. It was a real village.

Then we grew up, we got married, we had children, and our children play together in Tompkins Square Park. It was the playground for our children. We would have parties and be with our children. We looked out for each other’s children.

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

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village. East Village photographer Stacie Joy compiled today's post.



By Stacie Joy

Name: Roosmarijn van Kessel, 23
Occupation: Fashion designer; assistant to Tim Coppens
Location: 6th Street and Avenue B Garden
Time: 12:45 p.m., Saturday, July 2

I am from the Netherlands: I was born in Boxtel, a tiny town in the south. When I was 4 we moved to Nijmegen, a small university city. That’s where I did my high school and at 17 I moved to Amsterdam to start at art academy. I arrived in New York at the end of January this year. It was the weekend after the blizzard. I had my flight scheduled for the night of the blizzard but I couldn’t get a plane so in the end I arrived on a Tuesday night and I started my internship Wednesday morning.

I was sort of nervous when I landed, but happy I was here, and thought, Let’s get a cab to my apartment. I asked the driver to go to McKibbin Street Lofts and he said “Never heard of it” and I was thinking, Do I even have a place? I have to work tomorrow! In the end, I arrived at 1 a.m. and started hours later at my job. That was a crazy start. I lived there for two months. Then, in April, I moved to the East Village.

My apartment is cute. It’s a sublet, and I’m sharing it with another girl. She’s very nice and creative, a 3D animator and she has a cat with a Dutch name: Schatje, which means “cutie.” The first time I heard her saying, “Schatje!” I thought she was talking to her boyfriend. And my room, it’s small, but it’s a good room and I am really happy with the location.

I was lucky, I must say. I decided I wanted to move, and I went on this Facebook [housing] group, and saw this post that was posted three minutes prior and it said “summer sublet, East Village, East 13th Street, one roommate” and I was like, this is perfect! I responded, saying, Hi, I’m Roos, I can stay for the whole period, can I have a look? I got a response, like “Yeah, sure, you are the first one to react so let’s meet on Monday.” I arrived on Monday and she said she had 75 responses within the weekend.

I am staying here until half of August and then I have to find another place. So, I keep on searching, hopefully I will stay in this area. For me it looks a bit like Amsterdam. It’s very cozy, but still we’re in a big city. What I really like is seeing all the people on the street. All these bars and cafes, everyone is so nice. I feel like I know people here, when I get somewhere in the morning they know what kind of coffee I drink. When I arrived I didn’t know anyone.

There’s this coffee bar, called Coffee Project on East Fifth Street, and they’re the sweetest girls. They are making really good coffee. I like Ludlow Street. I go to an Italian restaurant there, Taverna di Bacco.

On [June 29] it was my birthday and I had a long work day, but I was not going to go home without dinner. I went there and the guy who is running the place said, “Roos, it’s your birthday! Have a glass of wine!” I am here alone and it’s not that I can call that many people to have a birthday dinner with, and it’s great that there’s this restaurant that is so welcoming. There was a woman who started reading the palm of my hand, as a birthday gift.

In my field you work very long hours. I start in the morning by 9 and work until 8:30 p.m., and there are days that I work even longer, especially now that it’s almost Fashion Week.

Being able to walk to and from work is relaxing and helpful. When I was living in Bushwick and taking the L train it was adding too much information when I’ve already had such a long day. I need time to process before sleep. I am searching for comfortable spaces, where I can sit on a bench and watch the river. I am happy when I'm close to the East River. Whenever I see the water I feel close to home. I think every Dutch person would agree that when you see water you feel at home.

The East Village to me is the easy village. It’s funny, when I lived in Amsterdam, on the weekends or my time off, I would always search for more energy. Whereas here, with all the energy that’s already here, I’m searching for comfortable situations.

In Amsterdam I was always thinking more, more, more, and here I already get so much, I am ready to just sit for an hour and read my book. In the Netherlands I was always reading English books and now here my mother sends me Dutch books!

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing 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: London
Occupation: Engineer (Music)
Location: 4th Street and 1st Avenue
Time: 4:30 pm on Thursday, June 30

I’m originally from the Bronx and grew up in Manhattan. I was raised in Brooklyn for half of my life, got into some trouble out there and my mom moved me to the Lower East Side. I lived by FDR Drive almost half my life. I lived over there in the Baruch Houses, grew up over there going to school.

It was pretty cool for me because you know, I was different. I learned how to play basketball. I met a lot of different people. Then after that the world started opening up for me, and as I got older things got rougher in the city. The Lower East Side used to be the city that never sleeps.

My mom, she was strung out on crack or whatever, so most of the time I was by myself. I raised myself out here. I’ve been raising myself until now, since I was young. Back then when I was out here, people used to walk around buying drugs and stuff on Avenue D. They would get ripped off; people would rob them, take their money. But they didn’t care because they wanted that fix. You know, I’ve seen a lot of stuff out there.

When I was around 22 or 23 ... I used to sell a lot of cocaine out there man. A lot of people used drugs. My friend [was selling] at the time and I used to sell weed. I was like damn; I used to see them make a lot of money.

Then this guy I used to know, he’d see me walking around all the time — this Dominican guy. He comes up to me, ‘Come here Papi.’ I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ He’s like, ‘I see you out here a lot, you want to make some money?’ I said, ‘Doing what?’ He said, ‘You know what this is?’ He showed me some coke. I was like, ‘that’s coke.’ He was like, ‘Well this is what I do.’ And then from there, I guess he just flooded me with cocaine. He gave me a job and I took advantage of it.

Instead of being out here hustling from hand to hand, you can get money smart. You can meet people that own businesses. A lot of these businesses out here, I used to go there and knock off coke for the staff, then leave that place and go to another spot. Half of these businesses out here, people use drugs. You would never know that. You could go in a restaurant and people would be sitting down eating. I used to walk in and it’s like, it’s candy time. It’s like a little kid walking in a candy store, and everybody’s like ‘oh shit.’ It’s like me walking in with a big bag of candy. I was making so much money through all these people.

A lot of my friends died. People are still doing the same shit. You know, sometimes people just gotta push themselves somewhere else, to the next level, and this ain’t it. I got my mom into rehab and then I bought her a house in Virginia, and I moved out there and I stayed away for 15 years, just to get away from all that shit that was out here.

I escaped everything. A lot of my friends were dying. I couldn’t take it no more, so I just left, took off. I started a new life. Now I’m into music, hip hop and R&B. I went back to school and all that, for engineering. But I’ve been doing [music] all my life.

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

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing 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: Colette Pwakah
Occupation: Artist, Adventurer, and Part-Timer. Editor of Time Warp. (Find a PDF of the zine here.)
Location: Tompkins Square Park
Time: 3 pm on Friday, June 10

This is Part 2 of our interview with Colette. Read Part 1 here. We start with the last paragraph from Part 1.

I left the city for maybe four months at a time each semester, and each time I came back to the city, the changes were very significant. It seems like time passes more quickly, here. You might leave for a week and it’s like a month has passed. It kind of freaked me out when I returned from my first semester and saw how the area around Mars Bar had changed in such little time. Astor Place suffered a similar fate. The streets are swarming with zombie-like people. It's like something outta the Twilight Zone.

I did a lot of research into local musicians, artists, and the area's history to help anchor me. My dad does The Shadow, so I get a lot of information about it, but it never really sunk in. I never really immersed myself in that history and in getting in touch with my community until I dropped out of college and needed to find myself.

In my research, I’d explore the city with new eyes. If you go out late at night and there’s no one on the streets, it’s kind of spooky. You can get really lost in that. It makes you feel like you’ve stepped back in time almost. Time Warp kind of came out of that. To get lost in the past or that fantasy is what I would call a time warp — this kind of void or disconnection from reality. The only thing that could really get you out of that was punk rock or rock 'n roll music. It gets you energized, fired up, and makes you want to do something. There's a sense of urgency in it. I wanted to do something. I didn’t just want to sit around and be sad anymore.

With Time Warp, I am trying to inspire people to act and actually do something instead of just being sad and resigned to the situation we’re in. We need more people to get organized. We need people to get together and actually make some kind of action on a large scale, whether it’s protest, boycott, graffiti with a real message... Anything is better than just sitting around waiting for our doom.

Just go out and do things; be positive. Don't give up. The city hasn’t been entirely lost. Do anything you think will help — use your imagination. Get angry, create your own zine, start a band, post up flyers. For example, I saw a photo of a flyer posted in Chinatown explaining to people that AirBnB is destroying their neighborhood. A lot of people don’t get that what they're doing is contributing to the ruin of the places they visit or move to and that they can either be part of the problem or part of the solution.

John Holmstrom was our first interviewee. In the interview, he encouraged us by saying things like, “The world is coming to an end and you’re going to grow up with this stuff! You guys should be angry! You guys should be doing something to wake people up!” When he said that I was like, 'fuck yeah!'... It really inspired me.

Jeremiah Moss also has a piece titled Get Angry that we included in the zine. It pretty much summed up what I had been feeling. Expect more issues of Time Warp in the future... we've got a lot of ideas a brewin'. We’ve also been putting on free punk/variety shows in Tompkins Square Park with a handful of collaborators, including The Shadow. The shows are happening all throughout the summer and early fall. (Find a list of shows below.)

The city is an ecosystem. While studying biology and whatnot, I noticed that the city itself has distinct parts that it relies on to function. You’ve got small businesses that serve the community and invasive chains that are difficult to compete with. You've also got people that contribute in the various niches they fill. People need a habitat that can support them, too... If people are too occupied with merely staying afloat, they can't do much else. When we lose parts of our city ecosystem, it suffers and risks collapse.

New York is being made to suit the invasive class. They’re trying to make it into Disney World. They’re turning it into an entertainment zone. The New York City I love is vulgar, filthy, and full of unique people. They’re trying to turn it into this family friendly, sterile, clean, G-rated place. New York City is not an entertainment zone. New York City is not Disneyland. I mean, children grew up here and we turned out fine. We don’t need to have everything clean and censored. It’s not meant to be that way and these people are coming in and trying to change it. If you move here and want to be a part of it, that’s good. If you move in and you want to change the place or you don’t want to be a part of it, then what are you doing here? You’re just part of the problem.

A lot of these people are coming in here and isolating themselves. They don’t want to be part of the community. They want to impose their preferences on the people here. A lot of these invaders don’t like poor people. They don’t even like the people that they’re moving near. Why come here if you don’t like poor people, you don’t like working class people, you don’t like people who look different from you and act different from you?

You don’t have to be born here to become a New Yorker but you have to be part of the community. Just because you come in here and you paid millions for your apartment or you come in here and you’re rich, doesn’t mean you’re any better than people less fortunate than you. The so-called 'vagrants' have seen more shit, dealt with more shit. They're more respectable than yuppies or hipsters that just come in here thinking they own the place and should be respected, despite their lack of respect for other people.

What I love most about the city is the people. The people are what make the city special. They give the city its energy. People always talk about the city's unique aura or its energy. That’s what everyone usually notices when they come here, and that’s what everyone seems to love about it, but it’s the people that make that energy, and when you drive the people out, all that will remain is a sterile shell of its former self.

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

Upcoming shows in Tompkins Square Park:

Dr. Know Benefit Show — July 23:
Maximum Penalty, Antidote, Cro-Mags, Token Entry, and Breakdown

TSP Riot 28th Anniversary — Aug. 6:
Iconicide, Psycho Sin, Coffin Daggers, and Simon Chardet plus more TBA

TSP Riot 28th Anniversary — Aug. 7:
Hammerbrain, Nihilistics, ISM, Killer Instinct plus more TBA

Take Back NYC and FUCK WORLD TRADE !! - Sept. 11:
The Crack Rock Steady 7, All Torn Up!, The Flux Machine and more extra special guests, TBA...

Out and About in the East Village

In this ongoing 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: Colette Pwakah
Occupation: Artist, Adventurer, and Part-Timer. Editor of Time Warp.
Location: Tompkins Square Park
Time: 3 pm on Friday, June 10

I was born and raised here: first near the Bowery, but I later moved further into the Lower East Side. My mom is from Syracuse and my dad is from Queens and Long Island. They moved to NYC in the early 1980s. I guess my dad always knew that he was meant to be in Manhattan, so he just had this drive to move here eventually. That was his goal.

Growing up in NYC was kind of fun and carefree. Most of my time was spent in the Tompkins playgrounds and the surrounding areas. I remember there were always a lot of strange characters around here. My dad would often point them out. He would say, ‘That kind of thing only happens here,’ or ‘only in New York.’ Living here, you'd learn to be more loving and accepting toward people, instead of hating or being afraid of people just because they look or act differently.

I was always into the punk aesthetic from a young age, and I liked that sort of music, but I didn’t know of any really good bands. Then in my late teens, I started doing more research and finding more genuine punk and rock 'n roll bands, like the real dank shit. Ramones, Misfits, the Clash, the Cramps, Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, Richard Hell & the Voidoids, Leftover Crack...

Even as a kid, I heard about CBGBs and I always kind of fantasized about being able to go to shows there. In 2006, I think I was 12 or 13 so I was too young to even go to the matinee shows, and that was when they shut down. My little dream was crushed right there.

When I was little, there were still a lot of empty lots, a lot of garages, a lot of parking lots, empty spaces that didn’t have nasty glassy towers built on them. What really makes me go into this mental disconnect, is that so much is changing, faster than ever before, and its kind of heartbreaking sometimes. It’s hard to develop or maintain a sense of place when your surroundings are always looking different from month to month. What you knew and loved about your neighborhood — the familiar sights and imperfections — is being steadily destroyed and replaced.

One of the things I love most about New York City is that you can be anyone you want to be here. Everyone will accept you. That’s how it should be and that’s how it’s always been. If you want to reinvent yourself, go for it. That’s kind of a punk thing, too. You can be true to yourself and not have people judging you... and if they do, who the hell cares? Embracing punk music and ideologies has helped a lot in my life transition.

I studied wildlife biology in college. I was extremely depressed, anxious, and isolated, repeating endless cycles. It felt like being in prison. After a couple of years, I realized that no one really listens to scientists anymore. I began to question the system I was conforming to. Graduating high school, finishing college, getting a degree in some field, and hopefully getting a job... That's not realistic. It doesn't work for everyone. I really wanted to save natural places and wildlife — especially wolves and other predators.

I realized that there’s just so much corruption in politics that you can’t really do much as a scientist anymore. You might publish a study but no one really pays attention to it. Our global environment and ecosystems wouldn't be in such a mess if people in power would listen to the scientists or even common sense, for that matter. They only listen to the money. So, what’s the point of spending more than four years of my life studying and doing this work if it’s not even going to make a difference?

I left the city for maybe four months at a time each semester, and each time I came back to the city, the changes were very significant. It seems like time passes more quickly, here. You might leave for a week and it’s like a month has passed. It kind of freaked me out when I returned from my first semester and saw how the area around Mars Bar had changed in such little time. Astor Place suffered a similar fate. The streets are swarming with zombie-like people. It's like something outta the Twilight Zone.

In part 2 next week, Pwakah discusses launching her zine. "With Time Warp, I am trying to inspire people to act and actually do something instead of just being sad and resigned to the situation we’re in." (Find a PDF of the zine here.)

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

Out and About in the East Village

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: Joe
Occupation: Retired, Teacher
Location: Village View, First Avenue
Time: 11 a.m. on Saturday, May 21

This is part 2 of the interview with Joe. Find part 1 here.

When I went to high school, I didn’t pay any tuition because I used to help out in the church, in St. Patrick’s — the original cathedral on Mott Street. I would suggest anybody, even if you’re not Catholic, to go over there because there’s a lot of history, and not only in the church but underneath. They’ve got catacombs and people buried down there.

I went to cathedral school, which was where you went to become a priest. Then when I graduated, I didn’t want to go to cathedral college because that was where you went before you went to the seminary. So I gave it up and I went to NYU.

We moved to Village View in 1964, when the co-op first went up. This area here on First Avenue, before they built these co-ops, they were all low buildings like the ones across the street. Mostly all the stores were carpet stores. They used to sell carpets, rugs, and across the street they had two Army-Navy stores. When World War II was over, they bought all that surplus stuff and sold it in the stores.

These buildings were supposed to be city projects. Lindsay became mayor and there was no more money. Just the concrete frame of the building was up and not the walls, and it stood like that for almost two years. Finally they made some kind of deal. NYU took over half of the mortgage of this place. They still own it. They don’t want to give it up. Then they made it co-ops. They took away a lot of the living room space and put terraces in.

These buildings became co-op, and a lot of good people from the city moved in here. They gave the people who lived in the neighborhood first choice, but a lot of people didn’t have the money to buy the apartments. Many people who came into the building at first were originals. That’s why you had a lot of Polish, Ukrainian and Italians in the building. It’s like a melting pot in here.

I worked at NYU. I was an anatomy teacher, and after that I retired. Most of the school was very small here at one time. They only had a little part of Washington Square. Most of their buildings were up in the Bronx in University Heights. When the real estate transition came about, NYU sold most of those buildings up in the Bronx and with all the money that they got, they bought all those factory buildings down here when the factories moved out. On Broadway they had all these hat companies. That was big in those days. So NYU bought those buildings, they renovated them, and they made classrooms.

NYU happens to be a very, very wealthy institution. In fact, it’s the second biggest private school in the United States. Between the night, the weekend, the part time, NYU has over 50,000 students. They own quite a number of businesses. They’re landowners and besides that they own businesses that people will to them. They owned Mueller Pasta. Langone gave them $200 million dollars just to put his name on the medical center.

I made my money and got out. It was good in a way and it stunk in another way. It was close for me, but it was very cliquish. It was not what you know, it was who you know.

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