Requiem for the East Village

The 20th anniversary of the

Tompkins Square Park riots has stirred me to think about how the East Village has changed since I grew up there in the eighties. The dilapidated bohemian idyll I remember is gone.

In 1986, when I was nine, my father, an ex-hippie, fled the rising rents of a cavernous Soho loft for a townhouse on 1st Ave and 10th Street. During those allegedly dark days of crime and decay we never feared for our safety. A harmless Italian-American alcoholic lived on our stoop cadging Salami sandwiches and five-dollar bills. I could walk up to my mom’s apartment in Stuyvesant Town alone, and was never bothered. I was, however, cautioned not to go east of Avenue A, into the dreaded heart of “Alphabet City.” I remember only one difficulty with the primarily working-class residents of the neighborhood. When my dad couldn't sleep because some teenagers were hanging around, talking loudly out front, he yelled from the third floor and told them to move down the block. The kids were visibly pissed off, but they acquiesced. This was hardly the mugging and mayhem that gentrification naysayers are routinely shouted down with.

Instead of asking the obnoxious young crowd to move, my old man should have given them high-fives, and the homeless guy on our stoop was worth more than an occasional five bucks. Once these so-called quality of life disturbances were policed out of existence, rents skyrocketed. Twenty years ago, my father paid $1,300 for the entire Tenth Street town house; adjusted for inflation that would equal $2,600 today.

Fedora wearing trust-fund hipsters now sit eating over-priced pork rolls and drinking Sapporo at Momofuku next door to my dad’s old townhouse. A friend with a poodle pays $2,100 a month to live in a 150 square foot rabbit warren on St. Marks and 1st Ave. She likes the East Village because she can "always get a soy latte." Studios in the ersatz modernist housing blocks that have cropped up from 13th street to East Houston routinely fetch over a million dollars.

Images of walking in another East Village that began dying in the late 90’s are still with me, however: Quentin Crisp, the expatriate British novelist, reposing languorously at a table in the Kiev, in ratty clothes and smudged make-up; Squatter punks with tall Mohawks sitting cross-legged on a St. Marks curb scrounging for change while one of their idols, Legs McNeil, founder of Punk Magazine steps over them haughtily; Puerto Rican teens banging together blocks of wood, at four in the morning, on 2nd and A, sinisterly yelling, “We got dope!” to tempt junkies into spending their last twenty dollars; The block of desolate vacant lots where bums warmed themselves at trashcan fires, between Mars bar to CBGB’s.

Quentin Crisp is long dead, and the grubby Kiev, which served cheap blintzes 24 hours a day, is a gaudy Korean restaurant. The squats have been razed for Co-ops, The drug trade has gone underground. Massive glass and steel buildings went up over the vacant lots off the Bowery. CBGB has closed and been replaced with a boutique that sells $400 Alligator skin Converse. Only Mars Bar stands, a bizarre anachronism, with its graffiti covered walls and no television set, offering a tantalizing glimpse of a bygone era.

Now the East Village belongs to my friend with the poodle. Most of my cohorts have moved at least as far as Brooklyn. The shabby clubs, bars and drug dealing spots that served as our backdrop have been glossed over with sleek, over-hyped Investment banker haunts like Willis’s. Three years ago, after my landlord died and his spoiled kids inherited my building, I left for Midtown’s Tudor City and I miss the convenience of my old apartment. But as I walked past a PR event that spilled out of the Bowery Hotel recently – a gaggle of paparazzi snapping off pictures at Page Six aspirants -- I thought, “the yuppies can have it.”

Comments

[Jenny]

i lived on 7th Street for 460.00 dollars a month in 1991. the city ate me alive, i did everything wrong. so needless to say i didn't last very long. i like your blog, i hope you continue writing and tell us more stories. the things that sticks out in my mind about those days are the street people i befriended, all long gone and/or dead, the Downtown Beirut, the village Idiot. anyway, enough of me blabbering.