Wingsch Real Estate Investments   

East Village in Manhattan

Wednesday, 17 February 2016 - 11:00 am (CET/MEZ) Berlin | Author/Destination: North America / Nordamerika
Category/Kategorie: General, New York City Reading Time:  12 minutes

🔊 Listen to this Post East Village is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan. Its boundary to the north is Gramercy Park and Stuyvesant Town, to the south by the Lower East Side, and to the east by the East River. Generally, although definitions vary on the neighborhood’s exact street boundaries, the East Village is considered to be the area east of Broadway to the East River, between 14th Street and Houston Street. The East Village contains several smaller vibrant communities, each with its own character: Alphabet City, Tompkins Square Park, Bowery, East River Park and La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez.

The area was once generally considered to be part of the Lower East Side, but began to develop its own identity and culture in the late 1960s, when many artists, musicians, students and hippies began to move into the area, attracted by cheap rents and the base of Beatniks who had lived there since the 1950s. The neighborhood has become a center of the counterculture in New York, and is known as the birthplace and historical home of many artistic movements, including punk rock and the Nuyorican literary movement. East Village is still known for its diverse community, vibrant nightlife and artistic sensibility, although in recent decades it has been argued that gentrification has changed the character of the neighborhood.

The area that is today known as the East Village was originally a farm owned by Dutch Governor-General Wouter van Twiller. Peter Stuyvesant received the deed to this farm in 1651, and his family held on to the land for over seven generations, until a descendant began selling off parcels of the property in the early 19th century. Wealthy townhouses dotted the dirt roads for a few decades until the great Irish and German immigration of the 1840s and 1850s. Speculative land owners began building multi-unit dwellings on lots meant for single family homes, and began renting out rooms and apartments to the growing working class, including many immigrants from Germany. From roughly the 1850s to first decade of the 20th century, the neighborhood has the third largest urban population of Germans outside of Vienna and Berlin, known as Klein Deutschland (“Little Germany“). It was America’s first foreign language neighborhood; hundreds of political, social, sports and recreational clubs were set up during this period, and some of these buildings still exist. However, the vitality of the community was sapped by the General Slocum disaster on June 15, 1904, in which over a thousand German-Americans died. Later waves of immigration also brought many Poles and, especially, Ukrainians to the area, creating an Ukrainian enclave in the city.

Over the last 100 years, the East Village and the Lower East Side have contributed significantly to American arts and culture in New York. The neighborhood has been the birthplace of cultural icons and movements from the American gangster to the Warhol Superstars, folk music to punk rock, anti-folk to hip-hop, advanced education to organized activism, experimental theater to the Beat Generation and the community of experimental musicians, composers and improvisers now loosely known as the Downtown Scene.

Until the mid-1960s, the area was simply the northern part of the Lower East Side, with a similar culture of immigrant, working class life. In the 1950s, the migration of Beatniks into the neighborhood later attracted hippies, musicians and artists well into the 1960s. The area was dubbed the “East Village”, to dissociate it from the image of slums evoked by the Lower East Side. According to The New York Times, a 1964 guide called Earl Wilson’s New York wrote that “artists, poets and promoters of coffeehouses from Greenwich Village are trying to remelt the neighborhood under the high-sounding name of ‘East Village.'” Newcomers and real estate brokers popularized the new name, and the term was adopted by the popular media by the mid-1960s. In 1966 a weekly newspaper, The East Village Other, appeared and The New York Times declared that the neighborhood “had come to be known” as the East Village in the edition of June 5, 1967. The East Village’s performance and art scene has declined since its height in the 1970s and 1980s.

As has often been the pattern in Manhattan, a neighborhood that is “discovered” by artists and bohemians and then becomes “hip”, will often begin to attract more affluent residents, which drives up the price of housing, and begins to drive out the residents who “turned over” the neighborhood. This is one theory of gentrification, and some argue that it has also occurred in the New York City neighborhoods SoHo and Tribeca in Manhattan, as well as Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Over the course of time, this demographic shift begins to change the essential character of the neighborhood: it becomes safer, more comfortable, less tolerant of noise, and less “edgy”. Some gentrification opponents say that this process causes the neighborhood to lose its unique identity for the sake of money.

Local community groups actively are working to gain individual and district landmark designations for the East Village to preserve and protect the architectural and cultural identity of the neighborhood. One such group is the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP). It has undertaken a complete survey of the East Village, documenting the history of every single building in the area. In the spring of 2011, the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) proposed two East Village historic districts: one small district covering the block of East 10th Street known as Tompkins Square North, and one larger district focused around lower Second Avenue that would encompass 15 blocks and 330 buildings. The original proposal for the larger district excluded buildings such as the Pyramid Club and the Russian Orthodox Cathedral on East 2nd Street. As a result of the efforts made by local community groups such as GVSHP, the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative, East Village Community Coalition, and Historic Districts Council, however, the proposed district now includes these buildings. In January 2012, the East 10th Street Historic District was designated by the LPC. Minutes before the designation, an out-of-scale rooftop addition on one of the included buildings was approved by the Department of Buildings. In October 2012 the East Village/Lower East Side Historic District – the larger district – was also designated by the LPC. Preservation and community groups of the East Village seek to have other buildings landmarked, including parts of St. Mark’s Place, the blocks to the north, and more of the streets bordering Tompkins Square Park. Other successful efforts to retain the neighborhood’s low-rise character by controlling development include the East Village downzoning of 2008 and the 3rd/4th Avenue Corridor downzoning, effective in 2010.

Read more on Lower East Side Preservation Initiative, The New York Times, 5 December 2020: East Village Fire Damages 128-Year-Old Church, NBC New York, 5 December 2020: Massive East Village Fire Destroys Historic 19th Century Church, The Guardian, 5 December 2020: Historic New York church housing Liberty Bell gutted by massive fire, Wikivoyage East Village and Wikipedia East Village (Smart Traveler App by U.S. Department of State - Weather report by weather.com - Johns Hopkins University & Medicine - Coronavirus Resource Center - Global Passport Power Rank - Democracy Index - GDP according to IMF, UN, and World Bank - Global Competitiveness Report - Corruption Perceptions Index - Press Freedom Index - World Justice Project - Rule of Law Index - UN Human Development Index - Global Peace Index - Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index). Photos by Wikimedia Commons. If you have a suggestion, critique, review or comment to this blog entry, we are looking forward to receive your e-mail at comment@wingsch.net. Please name the headline of the blog post to which your e-mail refers to in the subject line.









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