East of Bowery
Roughly forty blocks that have been the centre of about six different worlds, most of which left something behind.
The East Village runs from 14th Street down to Houston, and from the Bowery and Fourth Avenue east to the East River. The eastern portion, along Avenues A, B, C and D, is called Alphabet City.
It was not called the East Village until the 1960s. Before that it was simply the northern part of the Lower East Side, and the name change was largely a real-estate manoeuvre — an attempt to associate the area with Greenwich Village to the west, which was by then expensive.
What makes the neighbourhood worth understanding is the layering. A German immigrant city, then Eastern European and Jewish, then Puerto Rican and Ukrainian, then the centre of American countercultural music twice over — and all of it happened in the same tenement buildings, most of which are still standing.
What is here
- The history — Kleindeutschland, the General Slocum, and what replaced them
- Music history — the Fillmore East, CBGB, and Bowery punk
- Parks and gardens — Tompkins Square and the Alphabet City gardens
- Walking the neighbourhood — three routes that make sense of it
- Getting here
A note on what this is
This is a website. It is not a visitor centre and there is nowhere to visit — no desk, no brochures, no tours. If you want a physical visitor centre with historians on hand, the East Village History Project operates one at 61 East 4th Street, and it has nothing to do with this site.