From 1980 until 1996, John Leguizamo, the actor, comedian, writer and producer behind such hits as “Mambo Mouth” and “Ghetto Klown,” lived on East Seventh Street. He now resides in the central Village, but he still has roots in Alphabet City: his production offices are headquartered in his old brownstone there; and last month his wife Justine, who sits on the board of the Greenwich Village Society For Historic Preservation, spoke at a hearing that resulted in the landmarking of a block on East 10th Street.

Mr. Leguizamo told The Local that the East Village “will always hold a special place in my heart.” Of course, things have changed since the days when “you’d see Eric Bogosian at the bodega, Steve Buscemi buying a coffee, Iggy Pop at the health food store, Quentin Crisp tottering down the street,” as he wrote in his memoir. Over e-mail, he said, “The neighborhood used to be alive with all different kind of artists. Musicians, poets, painters, actors, singers, dancers. But the rich came in and all the squatters left and went to Brooklyn.”

So what’s there still to love about the “East Vill”? Mr. Leguizamo reflected on some of his past and present favorites. Read more…

Here, Ray Schultz, an East Village Other contributor, remembers editor Jaakov Kohn, as well as a famous incident involving R. Crumb and EVO publisher Joel Fabrikant. Though the publisher’s name often appears as Fabricant, we’re told by his onetime roommate Peter Leggieri, among others, that it was Fabrikant. Likewise, Jason Katzman, nephew of EVO editor Allen Katzman, confirms that the Ginsbergian spelling of his uncle’s given name, which also appears in the editor’s book proposal, is correct. We have seen it, even on EVO mastheads, as Alan or Allan, too. Anyway, as Charlie Frick pointed out, things like grammar and punctuation were quite fluid in those days. Mr. Schultz put it this way in an e-mail: “I wouldn’t trust my spelling from 1970, or anyone else’s.” And now, over to him.

Allan TannenbaumJaakov Kohn

Maybe it wasn’t the same as Gertrude Stein telling Hemingway, “You are a lost generation.” But the defining moment of the 1960s for me came when Jaakov Kohn said, “Think of The East Village Other as your Jewish mother.”

Boy, did I need to hear that. I was penniless and had bronchitis when I ran into him that snowy morning. He bought me a coffee, then suggested a cold treatment: “Buy a nickel-bag of heroin, divide it into six lines, snort two lines and go to sleep. Wake up, snort two more and go back to sleep. Then get up and snort the last two.”

Later, when we hit the office, I finished off the food left over from a photo shoot: fried chicken carved into genitalia.

Thus did EVO nurture “talent that other publications could not absorb,” as Jaakov Kohn put it.

And I was awed to be there. Founded in 1965 as the “newspaper of patarealism,” EVO was one of the best underground papers in the country, but it was different from most, run not by New Left types, but by old Beatniks like Jaakov Kohn. Read more…

Raeanne Rubinstein Claudia Dreifus

Sometime in the late 1960s, I was working, unhappily, for Local 1199 of the Drug and Hospital Workers Union here in New York City.  There were dozens of reasons why I was miserable with the job; the main ones being that I wasn’t particularly good at it and that I really wanted to write. But whenever I asked the union leadership if I could transfer to their news magazine, the answer was always, “Organizers organize and writers write.” In other words: No.

I finally left 1199 to take a job as the editor of another union’s newspaper, a post from which I was fired after producing a “1968 Election Special” without ever once mentioning the name of Hubert Horatio Humphrey.

So there I was: 23 and unemployed.

I had a pal from 1199, a writer/photographer named Joe Walker, who’d left the union to become the editor of Muhammed Speaks, the newspaper of the Nation of Islam. One day he phoned to say that he’d just done a story for The East Village Other and that they were looking for writers and that I ought go down there and talk to them.

“Nice bunch of guys,” Joe promised. “They’re open to all kinds of stories.” Read more…

EVO poster showing Mr. Frick.

Charlie Frick was a rock n’ roll writer and photographer for The East Village Other. He was a network television cameraman and in more recent years has become an independent media consultant. An original light box is among the artifacts he rescued from EVO’s last office in the Law Commune at 640 Broadway. Writing in 1979 for an Alternative Media Syndicate publication (hence at least one instance of “alternative” language), he described the “controlled artistic anarchy” of psychedelic design.

Tripping the Lightbox Fantastic

For more on “Blowing Minds: The East Village Other, the Rise of Underground Comix and the Alternative Press, 1965-72,” read about the exhibition here, and read more from EVO’s editors, writers, artists, and associates here.

Steve Kraus

As documented in a DNA Info video, Steve Kraus has been publishing the New York Good News since the 1960s. Now 82, he has lived just above Café Mogador on St. Marks Place for the past 37 years. He also volunteers for the Jewish Foundation of the Righteous. The following piece appeared in a 1979 booklet produced by the Alternative Press Syndicate, titled “Alternative Media: How the Muckrakers Saved America,” published by Bell and Howell. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Steve Kraus – How Green Was My Underground

For more on “Blowing Minds: The East Village Other, the Rise of Underground Comix and the Alternative Press, 1965-72,” read about the exhibition here, and read more from EVO’s editors, writers, artists, and associates here.

Last weekend, in one of our posts celebrating The East Village Other, Ed Sanders wrote that poet Ted Berrigan may have named the alternative newspaper after the Rimbaud line “I is an Other.” Mr. Sanders acknowledged, “Another account has Ishmael Reed coining the name.” In the comments, EVO editor Peter Leggieri wrote that Allen Katzman (who founded the paper along with Dan Rattiner and Walter Bowart) “always gave the impression that he had suggested the name ‘Other.'” After citing the reasons, Mr. Leggieri wrote, “However, if the question of origin came to a vote, I’d probably pull the lever for Ishmael Reed.” Here, now, is Mr. Reed himself, on his role in shaping The East Village Other.

Isamu Kawai Ishmael Reed, 1967

My receiving a job as the editor of a newspaper in Newark, N.J., led to the origin of The East Village Other. I worked a number of temporary jobs from the time I arrived in New York in the fall of 1962 until I left for California in the summer of 1967. One of those jobs was that of  a pollster for The Daily News. So when I went to the Department of Labor to get a temporary job, after the poll was completed, I was informed of an opening for a reporter for a new newspaper in Newark.

I had written for a newspaper in Buffalo called The Empire Star, edited by the great A.J. Smitherman, who was the target of mob violence during one of the worst riots in American history, the Tulsa riots of 1921, which left 300 blacks dead.

Smitherman believed in armed self-defense against lynching. After an interview with the investors, it was decided that I would be the editor of a newspaper that I named Advance. Although I had watched the production of a newspaper using the old linotype method while working for the newspaper in Buffalo, I hadn’t a clue about offset printing.

Walter Bowart was a bartender at Stanley’s, which was our hangout. It was owned by Stanley Tolkin who was a patron of the arts and our benefactor. Read more…

Rachel Ohm Left to right: Garrett Ford, Adam Toepfer, and
Jessica Garner.

Yesterday we discovered the trailer for “The Angelheads,” an indie flick that takes its title from “Howl” and is set in the East Village. To find out who’s behind the production, The Local stopped into a fundraiser at the Phoenix last night.

Turns out the film, set to be finished in February, is produced by a group of friends from Marymount Manhattan College. According to its writer and director, Garrett Ford, it follows two couples – one gay and one straight – living in the East Village.

“It’s about changing your identity based on who you’re with,” said Mr. Ford. “New York can chew people up and spit them out, but the message is ultimately about optimism and that it’s worth pursuing big things.” Read more…

Millennium Film Workshop may have to give up only some of its space rather than being forced to vacate the East Fourth Street building that La MaMa owns. Tamara Greenfield, the Executive Director of Fourth Arts Block and a mediator between the two parties, tells Runnin’ Scared that the document that was taken for an eviction notice Wednesday night “didn’t mean ‘You have to leave immediately.’ This is one step. [Millenium] will walk away from an old lease and develop a new lease.” Meanwhile La MaMa issues a statement: “Since December 2010 La MaMa has been talking and meeting with Millennium Film to try and understand how we can help them as they continue to find ways to stablize their organization. We will continue to do so. We believe and support the mission of Millennium Film and consider it a very important cultural institution.”

The above teaser for “The Angelheads” was just posted to YouTube, and a bit of internet sleuthing reveals there will be a fundraiser for the “romantic serio-comic independent feature film” at Phoenix Bar tonight at 7 p.m. True to the titular Ginsberg line about angelheaded hipsters, the film’s four protagonists seem to be burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night – mostly in cramped East Village apartments, though occasionally they get some air on a sun-splashed tenement rooftop or in Tompkins Square Park.

Per the film’s Twitter stream, shooting locations also included the Ninth Ward and East Side Ink, and the poster (tagline: “Love. Art. Ink.”) was shot at the Astor Place cube. We’ll have more about this local production as it nears its summer release date; in the meantime, enjoy the first look.

Related: More on ‘The Angelheads,’ a Film About Relationships in the East Village

Ellen Wallenstein

Surrounded by books and diaries, Judith Malina lives on Clinton Street, in an apartment above the basement space that for five years has housed the Living Theatre, the avant-garde theater group she co-founded in 1947. The actress, writer, and director thinks of the Lower East Side, her “spiritual home,” as a well of inspiration: “It inspires me every minute when I walk out on the street,” she recently told The Local. “It’s so rich in the history of art, of experimentation, of social progress, of anarchism. This is really so much the hub of what has happened and what I think will happen next.”

What better place, then, to pose the questions – as her new interactive play “History of the World” sets out to do – of “Who are you in history?” and “Who are you in the Beautiful Non-Violent Anarchist Revolution yet to come?” Before we answered that, we asked Ms. Malina a few questions of our own – about her favorite local spots, of course. Read more…

Over the weekend, The Local revisited the 1960s and The East Village Other. Before we return to the present-day, let’s dip back still further in time, with composer David Amram‘s memories of collaborating with Beat legends and jazz masters in the 1950s. This passage, written in 2003, is excerpted, courtesy of Paradigm Publishers, from his forthcoming book “David Amram: The First 80 Years.”

Burt Glinn David Amram playing the French horn at the
Five Spot, 1957.

“Go east of Avenue A when you move to New York,” said artist Joan Mitchell, the Summer of 1955 when she encouraged me to dare to leave Paris and come to live in New York City. “Go to the Lower East Side. It still has that soulfulness you are always talking about. Charlie Parker lived there. Artists like Franz Kline, and so many others still do. It’s the real New York. You’ll find it a haven from the Philistines. It’s an island within an island.”

When I came back home to the USA to live in New York, I moved to my sixth-floor walk-up railroad-flat apartment at 319 East Eighth Street (now torn down and rebuilt), between Avenues B and C in the Fall of 1955.

Joan Mitchell was right. The Lower East Side, now called the East Village, was an island within an island. There were still a handful of old men with pushcarts selling vegetables, pots and pans, used clothes and rags on the streets, and even a horse and wagon that was run by a man who claimed to be a gypsy prince who sharpened knives.

Yiddish, Spanish, Ukrainian, Russian, Romany and Polish were so frequently spoken that most of the East Village’s residents could say a few words in all the languages that filled the air. Their tapestry of sounds were accompanied by the delicious aroma of slowly simmering cabbage, blintzes, shashlik, arroz con pollo, pierogi and clouds of various dishes using enormous amounts of garlic and fried onions. Read more…

Drawing by Bill Beckman, Nov. 1966.

I first knew Walter Bowart around 1963 or ’64 when he was a bartender at Stanley’s Bar, located at 12th Street and Avenue B. Bowart was an artist who did some design work in early 1965 for LeMar, the Committee to Legalize Marijuana, which operated out of my Peace Eye Bookstore located in a former Kosher meat store on East 10th Street between Avenues B and C.

Allen Katzman I had known since 1961 when he helped run open readings at various east-side coffee houses, such as Les Deux Magots on East Seventh, and later the Cafe Le Metro on Second Avenue. Katzman was known at the time mainly as a poet.  (During his time at EVO, Katzman spelled his first name Allan.)

During the summer of 1965, Bowart, Katzman and others, including the artist Bill Beckman, Ishmael Reed, Jaakov Kohn, and Sherry Needham, decided to found a newspaper. Poet Ted Berrigan, as I recall, came up with the name, The East Village Other, with “Other” coming, of course, from Rimbaud’s famous line of 1871, “Je est un autre,” I is an Other. Another account has Ishmael Reed coining the name. (The participants in the Dada movement argued for 50 years over who first thought of the name “Dada.”) Read more…

Jane Wilson John Jonas Gruen, 1965.

Until John Jonas Gruen decamped for the Upper West Side with his wife, the painter Jane Wilson, and their daughter Julia, he lived at 317 East 10th Street, around the corner from the headquarters of The East Village Other. While covering the burgeoning neighborhood, the journalist befriended EVO editors Allen Katzman and Dan Rattiner. He recently told The Local, “I was the one who brought the East Village phenomenon to Clay Felker, one of my editors [at the New York Herald Tribune], who suggested I write all about it.” Mr. Gruen captured the era in a Nov. 29, 1964 article in the Herald Tribune’s Sunday supplement (the precursor to New York magazine), and then later in his 1966 book, “The New Bohemia,” a portion of which is excerpted here.

Jefferson Poland [was] an East Villager [who] made a name for himself by creating the League for Sexual Freedom, an organization devoted to, among other things, the legalization of prostitution. But Poland is also something of a clairvoyant in that he sensed a need for an East Village newspaper, a neighborhood paper that would function for the area as The Village Voice does so successfully for Greenwich Village.

The gap has now been filled by The East Village Other, a biweekly publication started in October 1965 by Walter Bowart, a 27-year-old painter who gave it a slim, but provocative kickoff with one thousand dollars and an excess of drive. With typically offbeat headquarters located on Tompkins Square Park, The Other currently boasts a circulation of 7,000 and champions the causes of New Bohemia. The style is one of humorous candor and immediacy designed to reach the same mass-media audience that so fervently responds to the folk-rock wailings of Bob Dylan. Bowart has said: “I came to the conclusion that most official journalism was a big fat opinion. Because of the superego conditioning of this society, most reporters are only spewing out status quo propaganda. I wanted an intrepid broadside paper, like Poor Richard’s Almanack or The Tatler. I was ready to gamble a thousand bucks on three issues and now we’re here to stay because no one else is speaking to the New Left with laughter.

“My hero,” Bowart concluded, “is Will Rogers.” Read more…

Illustration: Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall

How did you know Walter Bowart?

When I went to Japan to revise my book, “Japan on $5 a Day,” I had been dating Sherry Needham. When I returned, he was dating her.

Did you fight?

Of course not. I was just worried that she wouldn’t fulfill her promise to bare a breast in the fourth picture of a story I wanted to tell in one of those-25 cent photo machines.

And did she?

Yes, Walter came along and we had a high old time, assisted, as I remember, by the benevolent herb. Walter told me he was starting a new paper and I agreed to write for it. My first column was about how forgery had been a constant presence on the art scene for centuries. I called it “Art & Other Scenes” but Walter eliminated the “Art &.” The appearance of the column in EVO infuriated Ed Fancher [Village Voice founder and publisher] who insisted I choose between the two papers. Read more…

Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images From left: Dan Rattiner, Walter Bowart, and brothers Allen and Don Katzman. Jan. 14, 1966.

Little is it known that Dan Rattiner, doyen of Dan’s Papers, helped launch the East Village Other alongside its more celebrated founders, the late Walter Bowart and the late Allen Katzman. In 1964, having abandoned graduate school in architecture at Harvard, Mr. Rattiner, in between gigs producing a summer newspaper in Montauk, rented an apartment in a brownstone on West 10^th Street in Greenwich Village. A year later, in the fall of 1965, something amazed him on the newsstand at Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. He picks up the story from there.

It cost 15 cents and was an enormous piece of newsprint all folded up into tabloid size. The four pages, when unfolded looked more like a work of modern art than a newspaper. A new way to print a newspaper was on the market. It involved using scissors and rubber cement to put together a proof of a page, then making a plate from a photograph of it and then printing from that. But I had never seen anyone make use of the new process like this before; most people just used it to mimic the old.

As for the content, it was also revolutionary. The lead headline read: “TO COMMEMORATE THE GLORIOUS NEWSPAPER STRIKE THE HERETOFORE UNDERGROUND ‘OTHER’ EXPANDS ITS PATAREALISM.” In huge black type, the words coiled along the perimeter of the page and ended with a half-tone photograph of a half-closed eye. “Peace Rally Breeds Strange Bedfellows,” was the headline below. “Generation of Draft Dodgers” read another headline below that.

I bought it. And I looked for, and found the name, address and phone number of the publisher and editor, Walter Bowart. Read more…

Last month, The Local filmed artist Nicolina as she left a goodbye mural on her East Second Street block before setting off on a trip to Valparaiso, Chile and other locales. If you’re curious to see what she’s up to abroad, read this press release and watch the accompanying video released by the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, Chile: She recently collaborated with three Chilean artists and a group of children on a mural for the Instituto Chileno Norteamericano de Cultura in Valparaiso, as well as embellishing her existing paintings on the historic town’s funicular cars. Proof that the ol’ Lower East Side exports more than just salamis to boys in the Army.

Handsome Dick Manitoba, the owner of Manitoba’s bar on Avenue B, appeared on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” last week to promote his Throbblehead doll, his upcoming reunion show with the Dictators, and his radio program. Mr. Fallon is a big fan of the jukebox at Manitoba’s, which he calls the “best in any bar in New York City.” A bold claim considering The Library, Double Down, Mona’s, Sophie’s, Doc Holliday’s, B-Side, International Bar, and Mars Bar all have fine jukes (to name just a few). What’s your favorite in the neighborhood?

Tomorrow, a public hearing by the Landmarks Preservation Commission will determine the future of East 10th Street along Tompkins Square Park. Over the weekend, The Local spoke with Andrew Berman, the executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, about the history of the strip.

293 East 10th Street

G.V.S.H.P. 293 East 10th Street

This building, like a lot of buildings in the East Village, shows in a very material way the evolution of the neighborhood from a place of single-family homes for the merchant class to the locus of immigration to New York City. It was built at the corner of East 10th and Avenue A in 1845 for James French, a boot-maker.

Only five years later it was sold to a gentleman named Joshua Varian and a Haraim Chandler leased it from him. Chandler lived with seven other families. This building very quickly became a multi-family home, or a tenement. By the late 1890s it was owned by Charles J. Smith, whose name still appears on the top left-hand side of the building. The top floor of the building was probably added by Smith as part of the tenementi-zation of it.

Interestingly, we know that Chandler worked for the N.Y.P.D. very early in its existence; it was only founded in 1845. Chandler worked as a detective and was injured during the 1863 draft riots. He died in 1881.
Read more…

Design Observer Steve Heller as a SVA student.

Robert Hughes once described the weekly paste-up night at The East Village Other as “a Dada experience.” The year was 1970 and while none of us who were toiling into the wee hours of the morning at one of America’s oldest underground papers (founded in 1965) knew what he was talking about, we nevertheless assumed that to get Time’s then newly appointed art critic to spend some of his first weeknights in America with us, we were doing something weird and perhaps even important. “Dada was the German anti-art political-art movement of the 1920s,” he explained in his cool Australian accent. “And this is the closest thing I’ve come to seeing it recreated today. I’m really grateful for the chance to be here.”

Yet he needn’t have been so grateful. He was as welcome as any other artist, writer, musician, hanger-on and at that moment, detective Frank Serpico, the most famous whistle-blowing cop in America, was stationed at the local Ninth Precinct and would came around periodically in his various undercover costumes to schmooze with the EVO staffers. Paste-up night was open to anybody who drifted up to the dark loft above Bill Graham’s Fillmore East, a former Loews Theater turned rock palace on Second Avenue and Sixth Street, just next door to Ratner’s famous dairy restaurant, in a neighborhood that in the Thirties was the heart of New York’s Yiddish Theater. At that time it was the East Coast hippie capital.

Beginning at seven or eight o’clock at night and lasting until dawn, the regular and transient layout staff took the jumble of counterculture journalism and anti-establishment diatribe that was the paper’s editorial meat and threw it helter skelter onto layouts that were pretty anarchic. Anyone could join in whether they had graphic design experience or not, yet many of the gadfly layout artists were too stoned to complete their pages which were finished on the long subway ride to the printer deep inside Brooklyn. Read more…