The East Village is a neighborhood village in New York City in Downtown Manhattan Eastside.
The east side of Third Avenue and Bowery is roughly defined between 14th Street on Houston Street and the north side on the south.
The east village has three subsections: Alphabet City, which concerns single-letter-names avenues located in the east river of First Avenue.
Little Ukraine is near the 6th and 7th streets and Second Avenue. The last is the Bowery, which is located around the streets of the same name.
East Village was then divided into some plantations by the Dutch settlers. Also, it was occupied by the Americans, who were native Lenape.
East Village: Top 10 Amazing Facts
During the early 90s, the east town was occupied by many cities’ opulent real estate.
After some years, it started to grow more. It included many populates who were immigrants, including Manhattan’s Little Germany, which was once also known to be part of the Lower East Side.
After many years, many musicians, hippies, artists, and students started moving into this area. Later, the East Village was known for its own identity.
Every story and moment of the East Village is unique in its way. Also, it has some unexpected turns and twists.
From the four farmer homes of Allen Ginsberg to the birthplace of shag haircut. First, federally- America had a subsidized public housing project.
Some Fun Facts About the East Village
1. Making of Movies:
More than a few great movies are filmed here in the East Village, though some of the great films pretend they were filmed somewhere else.
Martin Scorsese’s Neo-noir classic “Taxi Driver,” most of the vital scenes of these movies were filmed at 226 East 13th Street in a then-menacingly run-down tenement.
One more movie was “The Godfather Part II,” filmed in 520-531 and 521-531.
East 6th Street in East Village was supposed to be filmed in turn-of-the-last-century Little Italy. “Ragtime,” an Oscar-winning movie in 1981, was also filmed in the Lower Eastside, and the village served as a stand-in for the early 20th century.
2. Yore’s Movie Palaces:
The East Village had several movie palaces and theatres in the early century. But none of these places or theatres are still functioning.
As used before, though few survive in altered from today, simultaneously, many palaces are completely erased with any of their existing evidence, like the buildings or blocks.
Some live examples are the 133-second avenue at St. Mark Church in the Bowery, which was the home of Negro Ensemble Company and helped launch Phylicia Rashad’s career, Angela Bassett.
Laurence Fishburne, also there is the 144-second avenue, now Veselka home.
The third one is 105 Second Avenue, which also functioned as the Movie theatre of Loew Commodore for about four decades and later became the legendary gay nightclub the Saint and the Fillmore East, a fabled performance venue, one of the best places for a fun night.
The movie palaces, which are no longer extant, now include Avenue A 98-108, 64-74 Avenue B, which was once a nursing home and now is converted into a banal brick building and was given a significant makeover for condo conversion in 2014.
This also replaced Avenue B Movie Theater of Loew. Last but not least, the Thirds Avenue 110-112, a Variety Arts Theater that was once one of the First Nickelodeon Theaters in the New York Times, is now a glassy high-rise condo tower.
3. Shag Haircut’s Birth Place:
The East Village is most known as the birthplace of many movements. Also, trends over more than 200 years, one of the strangest ones.
However, one of the easiest ones to pinpoint the start-up is a shag haircut, which dominated both women’s and men’s hairstyles from the early times to the mid-century.
Paul McGregor opened his salon of a haircut at 15 Saint Mark’s Place in 1965 and began giving customers shag haircuts that gave a messy, multi-layered appearance.
Some celebrities of that time, such as Goldie Hawn, Jane Fonda, and Warren Beatty, made this shag haircut more famous.
Then, the star Warren Beatty also made an adapted version of Paul McGregor and made it famous with a movie named “Shampoo,” which has at least a part of Paul McGregor.
After Paul McGregor shut down the shop, the former garage became a roller rink, a rock club, and a gay bar before it already had different stories added about it in 2004.
4. Disaster Memorial:
The Slocum Ferry Disaster General was one of the most significant losses and disasters of civilian life for the people of New York City to 9/11 and the U.S. waterways, the second-worst disaster.
One of the two memorials of East Village affected by the tragedy is also located in front of the Community Synagogue at 323-327 East 6th Street, which was earlier a different place.
The synagogue was built in 1847 as Saint Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany.
It was mainly the congregants on board the ill-fated ferry, which also caught fire and ran on the grounds in June in the early 90s; more than 1000 children and women were killed.
This tremendous loss and disaster affected life so much. They helped precipitate the rapid information of this area, which was influenced by immigrant Germans to a hugely eastern European Jewish immigrant nearby neighborhoods.
The present-day synagogue was taken over by the buildings in 1940.
5. Blues and Jazz Greats:
The East Village was also associated with musical genres and live music like psychedelic rock, punk rock, and rock n roll.
Still, the neighborhood has a great history of blues and jazz and the producers. Some examples of the blues and jazz great are 151 Avenue B. Also, the Jazz Grand Charlie Parker’s residence in the 1950s is one example.
The second example, 412 East 10th Street, Consummate Blues man Huddie’s Home “Lead Belly” Led better in the 1940s.
The third example is 242 East 3rd Street, the Slug’s saloon in the neighborhood of Legendary Jazz venues, where Lee Morgan, the jazz great, was shot and killed by his wife in the 90s.
The Five-spot Cafe at 5th Street 200 East and the former Stuyvesant Casino at 140-142 Second Avenue.
The Ukrainian national home is considered one of the great venues for jazz in the middle of the 20th century. Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, and Sonny Rollins have performed.
The building was replaced with senior housing in 1983 as it was demolished.
6. Tenement Synagogues:
The East Village is also rich in “tenement Synagogues” like the rest of the Lower East Side. Houses to worship are sandwiched into narrow slots.
Those between the tenements are built to serve low residents of the surrounding buildings.
Though the congregations were of modest means, some of the tenements had rich ornamentation and details, showing aspirations of religions and spirituals.
The two central tenements are: first at 242 East 7th Street is the congregation Beth Hamed rash Hagedon Anshe Ungarn; this landmark in New York City was converted into residences in 1985.
The second is at 415 East 6th Street, the Mezritch Synagogue; this building was saved from demolition in 2008 and was landmarked in 2012.
This is also the only tenement synagogue still operating in the East Village. The rest of the buildings are converted for the residents to provide income for the tiny congregation.
Some other tenement synagogues were found across Tompkins Square at 317 East 8th Street and just down the block at 431 East 6th Street.
Now, both are converted into residences. Six hundred thirty-eight East 6th Street functions as the Sixth Street community center. Also, 636 East 6th Street functions as a Pentecostal church.
7. Drag’s Origin
Drag is famous worldwide and in New York and is also great entertainment, illusion, mysticism, and humor.
In 1979, when the Pyramid Club at 101 Avenue opened, it took new in-your-face defiance as traditional gender-bending merged with the performance art outrage and downtown punk attitude on the small stage of the seminal East Village performance venue.
The club attracted many likes of the Red-Hot Chili Peppers, Madonna, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nirvana, Cyndi Lauper, RuPaul, and Keith Haring.
The ground floor is considered the German Social Hall, and the building was also the residence of the model Nico, the vocalist on the first album of The Velvet Underground.
8. Chameleon Churches:
The waves of immigration over 200 years in the East Village have helped many with an ever-changing and multi-faced kaleidoscope of some ethnicities.
For example, Saint Ann’s Church at 112 East 12th Street was earlier built as a Baptist church in 1847.
It became a synagogue, a catholic church in 1870, and an Armenian National Cathedral in East Village in 1983 before being converted into the empty entry tower in front of the NYU dorm.
The Holy Virgin Protection is the Russian Orthodox cathedral at 59-63 East 2nd Street, also built in 1891 as the Olivet Chapel. A protestant church by Josiah Cady was the architect of the Natural History Museum.
Previously, the first Hungarian reformed church was the American Orthodox Greek catholic church of Saint Mary at 121 East 7th Street.
In North America, the Christian Orthodox Catholic Church’s eastern confession and the church of Saint Paul and Saint Peter Russian Orthodox Church.
The Hispanic Mozarabic Rite of the San Isidoro y San Leandro orthodox catholic church at 345 East 4th Street was an unusual site that follows the crypto-Christian traditions of Moorish-occupied Spain.
This sect was first created in 1891 for the Hungarian people. Also, for the Slovak catholic church of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, the roman catholic church.
It was later home to the Carpathian Russian orthodox church of holy trinity and then turned into Saint Nicholas, the Russian orthodox church.
The iron gate, which shows the Russian Empire’s coat of arms, was added during that time.
9. Oldest Library:
The East Village has two of New York’s oldest libraries. The Tompkins Square Branch, or Tompkins Square Park, was built in 1904 and is one of the New York Library and the first Carnegie libraries.
After the consolidation of Greater New York, a series of branch libraries were built by wealthy industrialists in 1989.
The reforms improved many less fortunate city dwellers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The other oldest library is at 135 Second Avenue, the Bosendorfer branch library, built in 1883 as the first public library in New York Universities, a part of New York Public Library.
10. Allen Ginsberg:
There are only a few artists or poets whom the citizens identified as Allen Ginsberg in East Village, who died in 1997.
His entire adulthood was spent in several locations and was ubiquitous in the neighborhood. He lived with his lover, Peter Orlofsky, from 1958 to 1961 at 170 East 2nd Street.
He also helped Willian S. Burroughs write the “Naked Lunch” and the “Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg.” He lived at 437-439 East 12th Street from 1975 to 1996, which also overlooked the Christian Church Mary Help, frequently seen in this writing.
Also, Allen lived at the building of the artists’ colony at 405 East 13th, between 1961 and 1975, which was in the Street along the Larry Rivers and Claes Oldenburg, among others, tenement at East 10th Street at 406-408.
Closing Thoughts
East Village side streets are politically in New York’s 12th and 7th congressional districts.
It is also situated in New York’s 28th and 27th districts, and the New York state assembles the 65th, 66th, and 74th districts and its councils in the 1st and 2nd districts.
The East Village in New York City is a fantastic neighborhood to explore, and many historical events have taken place in the East Village.
So, if you are considering exploring past events, East Village is one of the best places to visit.
