
Dunno how long this flier has been up...but I just noticed it yesterday at Seventh Street and Avenue A. The flier goes on to accuse an area business owner of hiring "child molesters." It's signed by a "concerned parent in the neighborhood."
“Who was born there? Who died there? Who was shot there?” said the organizer of the event, Eric Ferrara. “We’re interested in everything that’s notable and not so notable.”
Indeed, even before the neighborhood trivia contest began, there was much discussion over the little matter of what to call the neighborhood.
Although contemporary maps generally refer to the area of the East Side between 14th Street and Houston Street as the East Village and reserve the Lower East Side label for the neighborhood south of Houston, most older maps call the entire area the Lower East Side. Some old-timers eschew the East Village name as an aspirational invention of real estate interests trying to pump up property values.
“I use East Village professionally because it is what people know today,” Mr. Ferrara said. “But with family and comrades we still call it the Lower East Side.”
Mr. Ferrara said that he does not reflexively oppose gentrification, but lamented that he had recently moved across the East River to Brooklyn after being evicted from a rent-stabilized apartment on East Third Street.
“I can’t even afford to live in my own neighborhood anymore,” he said.
It opened 42 years ago, in a time known by some as the Age of Aquarius, in a Manhattan neighborhood that was a hippie haven. It endured as a psychedelic oasis even as the hippies disappeared and the neighborhood, the East Village, was transformed into a pricier and less scruffy place by the real estate boom that washed across many parts of New York City.
LSD, located on the same block of Second Ave. as Gem Spa, B&H Dairy, The Orpheum, Stage Deli and Toy Tokyo, now has a new sign on its door, and it isn’t amusing. It’s an ugly announcement about the departure of yet another special facet of the East Village.
But how ironic and horrible that this unique “real estate” will most likely end up symbolizing a really bad acid trip when a Duane Reade or the equivalent no doubt occupies the space.