EAST VILLAGE

The East Village has been a home to the 17th Century indigenous people of the Lenape tribe, Dutch settlers, Ukrainian and other Eastern European immigrants, black farmers, wealthy white New Yorkers, hippies, New York University students, and musicians who birthed punk rock music.  

In the 1960s and 1970s, the East Village was a haven for hippies and the beat generation, Hare Krishnas, actors, playwrights, and musicians, etc.  Low rent apartments were available for aspiring artists dreaming of making it big on Broadway.  Then the East Village was one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Manhattan and full of drug addicts, hippie potheads, and street people.  A walk around the neighborhood was more than frightening.  But, culturally, a rebellion and avant-garde movement against commercial theater was underway.  Off-Off Broadway theater was thriving.  At Joe Papp's Public Theater, the musical, Hair, premiered, became a hit, and moved to Broadway.  Hair, and later A Chorus Line and Hamilton, opened at the Public.  All three impacted American culture, all three won Tony Awards, and two of them won Pulitzer Prizes.  

Plays were performed in rundown buildings in places sometimes hard to find.  An example of one is the Old Reliable Tavern in Alphabet City on East Third Street.   It was a Polish-Ukrainian bar operated by its Polish owner, Speedy, a thin, short man who loved theater.  The neighborhood was terrifying even to native New Yorkers.  Playwrights and actors joked about the Old Reliable's location telling friends:  "It's easy to find.  Just turn left at the burning automobile."   A number of the plays performed in the bar's small back room would become successful and famous.  

In the early days of the city's history, New Amsterdam's Director General of the West Indies Company, Peter Stuyvesant, built an estate at East Fourth and Fifth Streets that extended all the way to the East River and up to 20th Street.  His farm was in Bowery Village where Saint Mark's-in-the-Bowery Church now stands and where Stuyvesant is buried.  The only surviving street from that period is the very tiny but very charming Stuyvesant Street. 

A mass immigration of Ukrainian immigrants occurred from 1870 to 1899 before and during World War II as they escaped both the Russians and the Nazis.  This neighborhood became known as "Little Ukraine."  A walk on Second Avenue reveals some of the Ukrainian history.  Veselka Restaurant (222 E. 6th Street) has offered traditional Ukrainian food since 1954.  Until 2006, the Second Avenue Deli, operated by Abe Lebewohl, was one of the most popular delis.  Saint George's Ukrainian Catholic Church on E. 7th Street is of a classical Ukrainian Byzantine design.  Ironically, the church is diagonally across the street for the landmark bar, McSorley's OIe Ale House. 

The Cooper Union building is one of the most historically important buildings in the East Village.  At the Great Hall at Cooper Union on February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln gained national recognition with his passionate speech about the right of the federal government to control the spread of slavery.  Tickets to the event were 25 cents each and almost 1500 people attended.   The speech changed Lincoln's life and led him to the presidency.  The following quote from that evening appeared in newspapers all over the country:  "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."  

Photographer Mathew B. Brady, earlier that day, took a photograph of Lincoln at his Daguerria Miniature Gallery on Broadway and 10th Street just a short walk from Cooper Union.  This photograph of the 51-year-old Lincoln would be the first most Americans would ever see of him.  Both the photograph and Lincoln's speech would greatly increase his popularity and were highly instrumental in getting him the nomination for President.  Brady's photographs of American Civil War battles and Union and Confederate soldiers are the best known and most powerful of that war.  Sadly, Brady would die in-debt, penniless and unappreciated.  

Mark Twain, a less serious and much funnier American than Lincoln, also made his New York City debut at Cooper Union in May 1867.  Twain's speech made him as famous as Lincoln's speech had made Lincoln seven years before. 

Peter Cooper, an early advocate of emancipation and the enlistment in the Union army of Southern negroes, was a supporter of Abraham Lincoln and a philanthropist.  Cooper, an uneducated man himself, believed an education should be available to everyone.  He established Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1859.  It was the nation’s first free educational institution with full-tuition scholarships and the first to provide adult education to the working class.  People of all colors, all genders, rich or poor could get a free education at Cooper Union.  Mr. Cooper was a manufacturer of iron works, a businessman, President of the North American Telegraph Company, and an inventor of the first operating steam locomotive and gelatin/Jell-O). 

The NAACP, the International Ladies' Garment Worker Union, and the National Women's Suffrage Association, were all organizations formed by groups that met at Cooper Union.

Cooper Union is pictured above with the Astor Place Cube -- a 15-feet steel cube, which was created by Tony Rosenthal and installed in 1967.  The Cooper Union building, designed by Frederick A. Peterson, was one of the first buildings in the City with an elevator.  Rolled iron beams, manufactured at Cooper’s own iron foundry in New Jersey, were incorporated into the design. 

Rock and roll giants such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Doors, performed at Fillmore East on Second Avenue and Sixth Street.  Punk music was popular at CBGBs (Country, BlueGrass, and Blues), where Blondie, the Ramones, Patti Smith, David Bowie, the Talking Heads and the Velvet Underground often performed.  Mars Bar was a popular run down dive punk rock club in the 80s.  Its walls were was covered in graffiti, strong cheap drinks were served, and its jukebox had a super-great selection.  A favorite hangout of the young East Village crowd, the bar was intimidating to others.  It closed in 2011 and was demolished and replaced by a condo building.  

The East Side is in the southeastern part of Manhattan.  It encompasses the area east of the Bowery Street and Third Avenue and between 14th Street on the north and Houston Street on the south.