East Village in New York City - Essay Example

?Up s occur every 1440 minutes. East Village NYC The sands of time often have no effect on the grid of avenues and streets as the years pass. The neighborhoods in New York City, however, are organic entities. Resultantly, they are continually evolving and shifting with new features coming up, and the ancient ones vanishing over time. No other place embodies the essence of continuous reinvention like the East Village in New York City. This paper explores the history of East Village and St. Marks, and the impact that the various cultures and movements have had on them, making them the East Village and St. Marks that we now know. Geographically placed in-between Houston Street on the southern border, 14th Street on the northern border, the East River on the eastern border, and the Bowery and Third Avenue to the west, the initial consideration is that East Village lies within the Lower East Side, and to some of the native residents, it still is. Regardless of what it is called, East Village has come to be synonymous with dive bars, artists, sidewalk cafes, indie boutiques, and a disreputable hipster artistic that has resisted the homogenization affecting the other parts of Manhattan, but that is also now changing. East Village has long been an urban frontier, acting as a starting point for numerous new immigrants coming to America. For Puerto Rican, Irish, Ukrainian, Jewish, and German immigrants, just to name a few, East Village was more than just a location as it was a toehold that gave them a chance at a fresh start in their lives. Other than immigrants, East Village was a magnet for radicals, artists, reformers, and bohemians. East Village was home to the cultural activity that transformed the global community, but the other side of the coin holds a regular occurrence of neglect and poverty. In a time preceding the establishment of New Amsterdam in the 1600s by Dutch traders, the portion of Manhattan that has changed over time to become the East Village known today was a vast stretch of swampy marshland. Native American game trails and paths crisscrossed with this expanse, and a larger portion of these segments was made into permanent thoroughfares. The largest of them all became what is commonly known as the Bowery. A huge segment of what came to be the East Village was in the beginning part of the expansive farm belonging to the last governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant. John Jacob Astor, who was an Americanized fur baron who switched professions to become a real estate mogul, was the initiator of the transformations that changed the area to a status address, an upgrade from the pastoral countryside it was. This transformation was initiated by his luxurious style set up close to what is now known as Astor Place. By the East Village Visitor Center’s account, Astor place was the most sought after real estate by the close of the 1830s. Some of the most affluent industrialists, politicians, and merchants of that era including Gardiner, Vanderbilt, and Delano were buying property in this area from Astor. Astor Place soon joined the best of America’s fashionable addresses. Stuyvesant built the Reformed Dutch Chapel that later grew into St. Mark. This church was concentrated around the elders, who acted as the electors of their spiritual leader owing to their status as high-ranking congregation members. It is widely thought that during the initial era of St. Mark’s, the church made no secret about being people centered. Pew rent was collected at the church, and it selectively attended to the spiritual requirements of the incipient nobility centered on property, money, and trade. Early congregants still wallowing in magnitude of American insurgency considered themselves to be constitutionalists, however, their impartiality was founded predominantly on the protection of both their rights to economic expansion and property. Over time, Iron foundries gave way to blacksmith workshops, service posts gave way to livery posts, and Apartment buildings came up in the place of solitary family homes. But by the year 1941, most functional businesses progressively shifted to the west, and dwellings slumped out from the middle. Poor immigrants who arrived in sequential waves from Europe- mostly Eastern Europe, and particularly Germany- in due course made the area not so much as appealing to the society types as it was in 1830. Literature from the Visitor Center states that the working class begun setting up their roots in the area after most of the locally owned estates were sold off by their owners to public housing developers. During this period, the use of the term working class was somewhat of a neutral term. At the conclusion of the Civil War, the whole area between 14th Street all the way to Houston was a seething slum. The population of this slum consisted of a huge number of families crowded into airless public housing buildings and this group of people had to work grueling hours under wretched conditions in the neighboring slaughter houses, garment factories, and tanneries. The shantytowns and brutal working circumstances forced upon the inhabitants of East Village towards the late 19th century form the factors behind the establishment of the area as a hub for most social grassroots movements. Residents have held gatherings around and inside Tompkins Square Park that have, on occasion, turned into riots. These gatherings aim to strike back against unemployment, hunger, the government, the draft, curfews, and various wars among other social injustices ever since the 1850s. The police force has on several occasions, with varying success levels¬¬, had to disperse protests by angry mobs in the park and neighboring streets. The East Village’s standing as a sanctuary for counterculture has also attracted a number of influential writers, musicians, and artists of their corresponding generations to the area. This includes Madonna, W.H. Auden, Andy Warhol, Allan Ginsberg, Lou Reed, Keith Haring, and Charlie Parker, just to mention a few. As stated by the Visitor Center, for poet writers William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Ginsberg, among others, East Village was their home base way back in the 1950s. The incipient school of painting and visual art through abstract expressions also had its home base in East Village. Other than art and literature, music has for a long time been one of East Village’s chief exports. The 1970s and 80s were shattered by the recession, and during this time, the rundown buildings in the neighborhood provided developing artists with low-priced performance and creative spaces. Some legitimate venues on the Bowery such as CBGB & OMFUG, which is a renowned rock club, became world famous landmarks. The late 1970s East Coast cultures of punk-rock and the 1980s new wave are widely considered to have had their foundations rooted in this neighborhood. Homegrown groups such as the Velvet Underground and Blondie reinvented pop music. Madonna’s journey to stardom also begun in East Village during her days working at the Pyramid Club located on Avenue A as a coat-check lady in the dawn of the 1980s. In the present day, the last resonances of the punk era is represented by cliques of post-punk teenagers congregating on down market tattoo shops and stoops on St. Marks Place. These nostalgic teenagers for an era that predates their existence spend the day eyeing tourists with contempt. The original punk spirit continues in the not so many communal squats living in the small number of abandoned buildings left in East Village, but even these dwellings have seen a decrease in the recent past owing to the real estate boom that taken up all undeveloped space. During the course of its history, an ever-changing list of occupants has called East Village their home. This comprises the Irish and Germans in the 1900s, followed by Ukrainians and Eastern European Jews soon after that, and later an inflow of Puerto Ricans in the second half of the 20th century. This adds up to an incoming and outgoing human traffic of millions of individuals from various socioeconomic positions, and originating from various locations the world over. In recent times, urban renewal has transformed the appearance of the neighborhood to being virtually unrecognizable as the tough, destitute place it used to be. The area was overwhelmingly affected the Wall Street splendor of the first half of the 2000s. The success of the West Village naturally spilled over to the East Village, bringing in quite a number of young families and professionals. Initially, these families rented their apartments, but as their income levels grew coupled with the neighborhood feel and the old New York charm, these families started opting for the buying option. Pristine condos with glass walls have come up in the areas that were once occupied by tenement buildings. As a result, this has driven up the prices of property within the area with apartments going for ridiculously high prices, regardless of whether one is buying or renting. This has drawn mixed reactions from the residents with some welcoming the change as an improvement to their community. On the other hand, other lifetime residents of East Village are out rightly opposing this gentrification of their home turf. However, not all redevelopment in East Village can be denied. Tompkins Square Park has seen the addition of sunbathing lawns, performance space, a wading pool for children, and the first of its kind dog run partitioned to accommodate both small and big dogs alike. Moreover, most of the run down lots that used to be hubs for violence and criminal activity have been turned into gardens protected by the Community Garden Trust and are thus sheltered from development. To end with, although some would argue that all improvements put aside, East Village is not the place it used to be, progress is progress irrespective of the view point. The range of differing reactions to the urban renewal of East Village goes to show that all factors considered, what remains constant across the board, is that all members of the community benefit in one way or the other. Works Cited Fons, Hannah. "A Look at Manhattan's East Village." A Look at Manhattan's East Village. Cooperator, 2009. Web. 19 Nov. 2013. Morris, Alex. "New York Magazine." NYMag.com. New York Media LLC, 22 June 2008. Web. 19 Nov. 2013. Ramone, Joey. "Architecture of St. Mark's Church In-the-Bowery." St. Mark's Historic Landmark Fund. The Edelman Partnership, 2012. Web. 19 Nov. 2013. Strausbaugh, John. "WEEKEND EXPLORER; Paths of Resistance in the East Village." The New York Times. The New York Times, 14 Sept. 2007. Web. 19 Nov. 2013. "The Portico Restoration and Accessibility Project." Welcome To St. Mark's Church In The Bowery. N.p., 2013. Web. 19 Nov. 2013. Read More