The East Village is located North of Houston and South of 14th Street. The buildings in this neighborhood stay on the small side and are typically made up of older generation walk-ups. The East Village has more of the real bohemian feel and style than the West Village does. Many of the stores are music and art related. The main strip is St. Marks Place and Second Avenue.
A sub-section to the East Village is Alphabet City (named so because it is set between avenues A-D)-its just like East Village, only more so. Apartments here are generally less expensive than in the rest of the area, though rents in East Village have stayed on the moderate side for sometime now.
Tompkins Square Park, located in the middle of the village, has a rich history dating back to the 1870’s as being a hotbed for anarchists. The area was mostly built up in the late 19th century as a neighborhood for German immigrants. Later the Germans moved uptown and Eastern Europeans moved in. In the 50s and 60s Latinos came into the area, then came the beatniks, artists, hippies, bikers (NYC chapter of The Hell’s Angels), punk rockers and finally yuppies (the latter rapidly becoming the most populous group).
One major draw back of both neighborhoods is that there is really only one subway line that passes through it- the green line (4,5,6). If you are living in Alphabet City or anywhere east of 1st Ave. you might need to walk 10-15 min. to the closest subway station. Much of Third Avenue in this area has been taken over by New York University for student dormitories.
The main drag of the East Village is St. Mark’s Place between Third and Second Avenues, the center of hippiedom in the 1960’s when it was the site of one of the city’s larger early discotheques, The Electric Circus. The street is full boutiques and in the 1960’s had jazz clubs where such greats as Thelonius Monk and Ornette Coleman performed.
One of the city’s most delightful saloons is one block south of St. Mark’s Place: McSorley’s Old Ale House at 15 East 7th Street, which was opened in 1854 and has inexpensive beer, cheese and crackers and onions and very hot mustard, and fascinating memorabilia.
One of the city’s famous restaurant row streets is 6th Street between Second and First Avenue where the specialty is Indian food.
One of the city’s most beautiful and historic churches is St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery on Second Avenue at 10th Street. It was designed by Ithiel Town and completed in 1799 and restored in 1984. Several early Federal houses are nearby on the one-block-long Stuyvesant Street.
An indication of the East Village’s more illustrious past is the Old Merchant’s House of New York at 29 East 4th Street, formerly the Seabury Tredwell residence and originally the home of Joseph Brewster. Built in 1832, this Federal style townhouse is open to the public. One of the most incongruous landmarks in the city is the Condict Building, later known as the Bayard Building, which was designed by Louis Sullivan and Lyndon P. Smith and completed in 1898. This terracotta loft building is richly decorated in Sullivan’s own version of Art Nouveau style that was in marked contrast with the Beaux-Arts styles then prevalent, but it is startling because its elegance is like a man in a white suit in a group of mourners.
The southern part of the Bowery has many jewelry stores and light fixture and kitchen supply stores, but a large stretch is still habituated by the driftless "bums." Further north, however, it has several long-established nightclubs, such as CBGB’s, and in the late 1990’s, a restaurant known as the Bowery Bar became quite trendy.
The area between Houston and 14th Streets, Avenue A and the East River has been known as "Alphabet City," because of the lettered avenues, and also as Loisaida, the Hispanic pronunciation for Lower East Side. The area west of Avenue A has had a rich mixture of cultures, but, beginning in the 1960’s, it also had many problems relating to drugs and crime.
The Art Deco Christadora House apartment building on the northeast corner of Ninth Street and Avenue B looms over Tompkins Square Park between 7th and 10th Streets and Avenues A and B. It was completed in 1928 as a settlement house and designed by Henry C. Pelton and its third floor concert hall was the site of George Gershwin’s first public recital. With the renaissance of the Flatiron Districts to the north the SoHo and NoHo districts to the west, the central location of much of the East Village is likely to witness considerable gentrification. New private residential construction began to occur on its southern fringes in the early 1990’s and the city’s very tight housing market and many residential conversions in Lower Manhattan in the late 1990’s is sure to add to pressures on the Lower East Side, whose land resource is ripe for development.
Proposals to create a Lower Manhattan Expressway to connect East River Bridges with the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey created a major controversy in the 1960’s and were finally defeated although a very grandiose and spectacular plan was published by architect Paul Rudolph in the 1970’s.
