COVID-19 and current social unrest have hit the East Village hard, particularly local businesses. We could use your help. Interested in volunteering around the East Village? Sign up here to help out.
Making music this Sunday morning on 2nd Avenue with the aid of @LinkNYC #sexpistols pic.twitter.com/OLvTgV5Dd0
— evgrieve (@evgrieve) August 26, 2018
Name: Merle Ratner
Occupation: Labor Rights Organizer at the International Commission for Labor Rights
Location: Avenue A Between 3rd Street and 4th Street
Date: Thursday, March 2 at 3 p.m.
I’m from the Bronx. I lived here in the early 1980s ... I moved back here about 30-something years ago because I wanted to live in a multiracial, working-class neighborhood.
It was not gentrified like it is now. There were a lot more working-class and poor people, and not as many restaurants. There were also not so many vacant stores. Every store was filled — there were more mom-and-pop places. I liked Bernstein’s on Essex. It was a kosher deli with Chinese waiters. They had the best pastrami. It was an interesting place.
Then and now it has been a politically active area – anti-gentrification struggles later, always anti-war struggles, anti-racism struggles, and LGBT struggles. It’s a traditionally immigrant area, from here down to the whole Lower East Side. It’s where my grandparents came when they came from Odessa in the early part of the 20th Century.
It’s a very diverse community culturally and politically – it’s very progressive. I went to the rally against Trump here in Tompkins Square Park, and every time there’s a demonstration in Washington or New York there’s a huge contingent from this area that go. So I like to be among working-class people, although that’s changing a little bit. But the projects are here. They’re not going anywhere. We’re going to fight to keep them here. It’s a neighborhood where I feel comfortable.
There’s also a long tradition with the labor movement. A lot of labor activists have been active here and still stay here, and Trump is trying to kill the labor movement. That’s a particular struggle, for unions and labor rights. I think that if we don’t organize as workers and fight, not only for labor union rights but for a different society, an alternative to capitalism, we’re all going to go down.
I work for the International Commission for Labor Rights, but I’m also on the board at the Laundry Workers Center, which organizes low-wage immigrant laundry and food service workers, and has a big struggle with B&H Photo Video, which is trying to move a lot of the jobs of the Union-organized shop to New Jersey. So that’s an important struggle.
My family has a history — my grandmother, when she came from Odessa, was the first woman business agent at the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and my mother was a member of Local 1707 Day Care Workers. I have a picture in my house of my grandmother, it must have been in the 1920s, with a long skirt with a bustle, the very traditional thing that women wore, holding a picket sign with her friend that said, ‘Don’t be a scab.’
After a disaster like the deadly Second Avenue explosion and fire, impacted small businesses struggle to survive. #SaveNYC is holding a Small Biz Crawl along Second Avenue to bring customers, cash and attention to those mom-and-pops in need. This weekend, we’ll do the western side of Second Avenue; next time, the eastern side.
Meet #SaveNYC on Saturday, April 11, at noon. We’re starting at Gem Spa on the northwest corner of Second Avenue and St. Mark’s Place. Buy your magazines, newspapers and egg creams at this first stop. From there, we’ll head down toward 7th Street. Do some gift shopping at Himalayan Visions. Then it’s lunch at the B&H Dairy or Paul’s Da Burger Joint. Your choice. After lunch, we’ll weave our way across the barricades of 7th Street to stock up on groceries at the New Yorkers Foodmarket. Please bring your #SaveNYC sign to let everyone know who we are and why we’re there. Click here to print out signs — and to find out more about #SaveNYC.
While we will always miss the old version of the sign, we have to applaud them for not going the vinyl awning route that so many stores now use. The green color of the sign and entire storefront IS very attention-grabbing. Not many stores have a green storefront!
