Jesse FishThe Yippie movement started in the basement of this building at 30 St. Marks Place.

“New York is naturally fantastic — especially where I live — just one gigantic happening,” wrote the young 1960’s political activist, Abbie Hoffman, while living on Avenue C and 11th Street. Hoffman, the counterculture, anti-war advocate had recently arrived in the city divorced, jobless and estranged from his family in Worcester, Mass. Feeling free and ambitious, Hoffman promptly set out to organize political and spiritual movements which he believed would change the warring Western world.

Hoffman, along with Jerry Rubin, went on to establish the Yippie — short for Youth International Party — political group while residing in a basement apartment at 30 St. Marks Place, until recently home to the Japanese restaurant Go. In Hoffman’s mind, the Yippies would be an answer to the hippie movement, which he believed was aimless and too drug-centered to accomplish any real change in United States policy.

Hoffman once affirmed that a “Yippie is a hippie who’s been beaten up by the cops,” and thought that the neighborhood was the perfect launching pad for his alternative faction. Abbie spoke of the East Village as “the real hip underground, the successor to Greenwich Village as the heartland of bohemianism.”
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eastvillagedenizen A scene from last year’s Howl Festival.

Allen Ginsberg first moved to the East Village in October 1952, renting apartment 16 of 206 East Seventh Street, for which he paid $33.60 a month rent. He lived in the neighborhood for the rest of his life, staying in a number of tenements until his death in 1997.

This evening at 5, the eighth annual Howlfest kicks off in Tompkins Square Park with a reading of his epic poem “Howl” by a host of noted poets including John Giorno, Hettie Jones, and Ed Sanders. The reading will be emceed by Bob Holman of the Bowery Poetry Club. The reading should have added impact, as today would have been Ginsberg’s 85th birthday.

This annual extravaganza of local creative energy continues throughout the weekend with a full calendar of events. In addition to poetry, local musicians, dancers, actors and artists will all be presenting their work. Perhaps the world’s longest canvas will be erected on the park fence and you will have the opportunity of viewing 140 artists work on their creations in their section.

The beautiful weather forecast for the weekend is sure to draw crowds and you should head over to Tompkins Square to join in the celebration.

Illustration by Tim Milk

Last night saw the opening of an exhibit at LaMama Galleria, curated by John Chaich for Visual AIDS, a contemporary arts organization dedicated to HIV prevention and AIDS awareness. Entitled “Mixed Messages,” the show hosts a bevy of star names, among them Yoko Ono, John Giorno, Gran Fury and General Idea. It features the seminal provocation piece by David Wojnarowicz, “Untitled” (1990), more popularly known as “One Day this Kid…”.

Much of the work recalls the typographic-heavy message art which prevailed in the 1990’s. Indeed, one could say that this exhibition is in part a retrospective of that period.

The exhibition is accompanied by associated talk and benefit events. More information can be found on the La Mama website.

Kenan Christiansen P.S. 122, 150 First Avenue.

In the late 1970’s, the East Village was “a neighborhood about to become something,” queer performance artist Tim Miller told The Local.

“Previous generations had established, in terms of cultural stuff, their foothold in SoHo, so it was already too expensive and certainly in my mind not nearly as radical in its politics or cultural stance” as the East Village where, he said, the feeling “was so different.” Attracted by this, Mr. Miller and other artists like him began to seek out East Village’s real estate with performance space potential.

Though performance art was not new to the area, with already active venues like popular visual artist hang-out Club 57, experimental art venue the Electric Circus, and theater space La Mama, a new wave of influential artists put down roots in the neighborhood during this time and, in particular, established queer performance spaces that would become recognized cultural institutions and cornerstones of the performance art world.

In 1980, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, founding members of lesbian performance art group Split Britches, organized the first annual Women’s One World Festival or WOW, a showcase plays by women authors, at the now defunct Electric Circus Club. Ms. Shaw and Ms. Weaver mounted the festival, “to fill this big dark hole. It was this big vacant space of nowhere for lesbians to perform,” according to Ms. Shaw. To advertise, she told an audience at a queer spaces forum last December, she hung huge banners along St. Marks featuring hand-drawn pictures of naked women.
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Graphic by Tim Milk

The Merchant’s House Museum, at 29 East Fourth Street, is hosting two star attractions this season. The first, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the onset of the Civil War, is “Medical Photography from The Burns Archive.” It features photographs of Civil War casualties, meticulously documented through the war years by Dr. R. B. Bontecou, as well as a genuine army surgeon’s operating kit, complete with amputation knife. It is chilling to see the destructive effect of the period weaponry on the soldiers, corpsmen and drummer boys at the front of the lines. The Burns Collection in all its facets can be seen here.

Tim MilkThe corner of a servant’s room.

Dr. Stanley Burns’ overview of Dr. R. B. Bontecou’s photographs, “Shooting Soldiers,” can be accessed at www.burnspress.com.

Secondly, the curators of Merchant’s House are pleased to open the household servants’ quarters to the public for the very first time. These are quite possibly the oldest extant immigrant Irish living quarters in the city. See the world as they did, through the attic dormers. Observe the call-bell hooked to a chord that led downstairs, which hearkened them to their duties. Living together beneath the roof as they did, the Irish women communed much closer to the elements and much farther from comfort than did the “better half.” As always, the museum is a fascinating visit to a bygone era, with original décor and furnishings dating back to the 1830’s.

“Medical Photography from The Burns Archive” runs through Aug. 1. The self-guided tour is a continuing event. For information on hours, stop by the Merchant’s House website: www.merchantshouse.com

Grace MaaloufThe Community Synagogue on East 6th Street is one of the significant buildings to be included in the proposed new historic district.

As gentrification continues to alter the East Village landscape, attempts are afoot to have sections of the neighborhood designated a historic district, helping to preserve their architecture and character.

Following extensive surveying and examining the neighborhood, The NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission recommended at an April 26 meeting that two areas of the East Village be designated historic districts. This is a preliminary step in the process, with a follow-up public presentation and hearing before the Landmarks Subcommittee of Community Board 3 on Thursday this week.

The two areas slated to constitute this historic district include approximately 300 buildings. One section is the north side of East 10th Street between Avenues A and B, opposite the northern boundary of Tompkins Square Park. This block includes a mix of stately 19th century brownstones along with tenement buildings.

The second area is from East 2nd Street to East 7th Streets, between the Bowery and Avenue A. Read more…

Phoenix Eisenberg

The range of life forms seen around the East Village and Lower East Side this past weekend was pretty astonishing, when you think about it: all the way from top-rank architects, artists, and scholars to bees and worms.

The Festival of Ideas for the New City hosted over 100 events, from small gallery projects to expensive international design competitions, and put a spotlight on this neighborhood’s enduring artiness, earthiness, and connectedness. Organized by the New Museum of Contemporary Art and ten other partners (listed at the festival website), the Festival was part multimedia art show, part kid-friendly community fair, part academic conference, part urban design charrette, and part intellectual pub crawl.

It’s easy to tire of the kind of NYC booster who constantly tells out-of-towners “you name it, we’ve got it here,” but during the Festival, particularly the Streetfest component last Saturday, the well-worn phrase really did apply. Humongous translucent bubble full of urban-design visionaries, some adrenalined-up enough to leap onto chairs and quote poetry? Check. Pop-up buildings resembling worms? Check. Person dressed as enormous yellow worm, hugging passersby at the Lower East Side Ecology Center’s table while her colleague Kaity Tsui, winner of the first-ever “Greenest New Yorker” award from the state’s “I Love NY” campaign in 2010, hands out “Hug a Worm” buttons and promotes home composting? Check. Eighteen-foot “Girlzilla” robot built by kids at the Lower East Side Girls’ Club? Check. Read more…

Since the early 19th century, locals and visitors alike have gazed at the striking Gothic architecture of Grace Church, located on Broadway and 10th Street. However, if visitors were to venture through the church’s doors, they are also likely to encounter a rich crescendo of organ music.

Grace Church’s artist-in-residence and concert organist, Stephen Tharp, helps to maintain Grace’s musical legacy alongside its master of choristers, Patrick Allen.

Today, Grace Church is undergoing a massive restoration process. In addition to stained glass windows and ornate woodwork, Grace will fit the colossal building with a world-class organ by 2012. Besides Mr. Tharp’s career accomplishments as an organist (touring around the world, composing his own music, and performing for the pope), he is eager to fortify Grace’s musical legacy on its brand new organ.

The Local speaks with Mr. Tharp about his current position as artist-in-residence at a church that is evolving both architecturally and musically.

NYU Journalism’s Stephanie Buck and Kristin Buettner report.

Mark Riffee There are 23 galleries on Orchard Street between Canal and Houston Streets and 71 total in the Lower East Side.

In the more than three years since to The Times declared, ‘Here comes art,” with the opening of the New Museum space on the Bowery in 2007, the galleries indeed have come to the Lower East Side.

They occupy ground-level storefronts of skinny buildings with wrought-iron fire escapes zigzagging up their front facades on the seven tree-speckled blocks of Orchard Street between Canal and Houston and in the New Museum’s vicinity, too. They teeter on the edge of Houston. When Miguel Abreu opened his eponymous gallery at 36 Orchard Street in 2006, he can remember no more than four or five reputable galleries in the area. By the time the New Museum opened the next year, the Times counted two dozen. Now there are 75.

And the movement is inching northward.

So, East Villagers, is this a cultural revival on the scale of the 1980’s, which spawned the likes of Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Jenny Holzer? It’s hard to ignore the similarities. Like the East Village was, the Lower East Side has become a hotbed of intimate spaces at the bottom of tenement-style buildings run on low budgets by young gallerists eager to be the first to show New York’s freshest talent. The new scene is home to “very idealistic people who believe in the art. And that’s incredibly admirable,” says Pepe Karmel, 55, a professor of art history at NYU and a former art critic for The Times. “There’s really a place for that in the art world.”

Like their predecessors, the participants of this new scene put authenticity above all else. Mr. Abreu, 48, chose his Orchard Street location because adding to the Chelsea “super-market,” land of the “homogenous white cube,” wouldn’t allow any potential for distinction. In the Lower East Side, collectors and gallery-goers can expect to “discover something” and engage in “some kind of conversation with the work,” says Mr. Abreu Read more…

Ronald Sosinski, 62, is the director of The Proposition art gallery at 2 Extra Place and an East Village resident for more than 20 years. He and his business partner, Ellen Donahue, opened E.M. Donahue Gallery for Contemporary Art on East 11th Street between Avenues A and B in 1985 and followed the art scene to SoHo in 1987 and to Chelsea in 2002, where the space was renamed The Proposition. After more than 20 years away from the East Village, Mr. Sosinski and Ms. Donahue reopened the gallery on Extra Place (First Street just off of Bowery) in 2010. Mr. Sosinski discusses The Proposition’s current show and the gallery’s new location.

NYU Journalism’s Mark Riffee reports.

“A Step Back into the Future” is on display until May 1. The show features mid-20th century furniture by James Mont, custom wallpaper by Este Lewis, and a sculpture by Mickalene Thomas.

Crystal Bell >Inside the Fan Cave, Mr. O’Hara, with two visitors, watch the game on 12 32-inch TV screens and three other 60-inch screens for optimal fan-viewing experience.

If you’ve passed the corner of Broadway and East Fourth Street recently, you’ve probably noticed a new installation

Crystal BellCelebration champagne bottle from 1994. Once a week, visitors can come in and have their MLB memorabilia appraised for free.

occupying the former home of Tower Records. It’s called the MLB Fan Cave, an interactive space for baseball fanatics, and it also doubles as a summer home for Mike O’Hara, 37, and Ryan Wagner, 25, the two superfans who were chosen by Major League Baseball to live there and watch every single game this season.

“An interactive fan space like this has never been done before, “ said Mr. Wagner. “We want this space to be a place with music, art and performers, where baseball would be the common thread. We want there to be something for everyone. We want to entertain the people of this city.”

“It should mirror the East Village,” adds Mr. O’Hara. “We want pop culture meets baseball. We want to bring in baseball players and legends but also actors, musicians and comedians because they all watch baseball too. It’s the American sport.”
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Jesse Fish

The East Village has historically been visited by and home to a diverse and eclectic variety of artists, musicians and writers. More than 50 years ago it was the domicile of the late drug-ingesting, drink-swilling gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. In the winter of 1959 the 22-year-old Thompson listed his address as 69 East Fourth Street, a residence he shared with a friend.

According to Thompson’s letters in “The Proud Highway” (1997), the native Kentuckian befriended a number of Louisville expatriates while living in downtown Manhattan. Most of “them move in different circles,” he wrote to the editor of a hometown paper, ”and all of them have their own reasons for leaving.” Thompson wrote explained that his story would be “a single shot (Louisville Expatriates in New York) or a series of contrasting interviews.” New York City was not easy for The Good Doctor at this time and he had moved in and out of the area on occasion. While living in Greenwich Village a year before, Thompson wrote an unsolicited letter to a newspaper in British Columbia stating that he would be willing to “work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don’t give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations.”

The erratic and spontaneous Thompson, who once stated that he had “no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me,” bounced through a variety of neighborhoods and writing jobs in Manhattan during the late 1950’s and throughout the 1960’s. During this time he also briefly studied short story writing at Columbia University and wrote a novel, “Prince Jellyfish,” which remains unpublished. The work has been described as “an autobiographical novel about a boy from Louisville, going to the big city and struggling against the dunces to make his way.”

Despite his initial grappling as a young writer in the city, Thompson always had time and money for a few brews and one of his favorite haunts, McSorley’s Old Ale House, is within stumbling distance of the East Fourth Street address. Additionally, the Hell’s Angels New York headquarters are located near this residence on 77 East Third Street. This is interesting to note because Thompson’s first published book, “Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs” (1966), was a non-fiction publication that Thompson penned while riding with the notorious biking gang in the early 1960’s. It is not known if Thompson ever visited their East Village hangout before the 1966 publication of the book, but the thought of a boozed up and downtrodden young Thompson asleep on the group’s bench outside does not seem incredibly far-fetched.

Mateusz Stankiewicz/AF Photo Aga Zaryan, a multi-platinum jazz singer from Poland, will make a pair of rare New York concert appearances this weekend, including one in the East Village Sunday.

Aga Zaryan is performing at Joe’s Pub for her second concert in the East Village, a neighborhood she calls “the heart of Manhattan.”

“I love that area, just taking walks around there,” said Ms. Zaryan, 35. “It’s a fascinating place.”

The multi-platinum singer, one of Poland’s top, contemporary jazz musicians, last performed there in 2007 in front of an audience filled with Americans and Poles, many of whom live in the East Village. She’s back for another concert on Sunday.

“I like so many clubs in New York, but this one is so interesting because it’s not just about music; you have all different kinds of people coming in,” she said. “You have musicians that play different styles of music. It’s a very open place for creative musicians. I enjoyed performing there.” Tonight, she’s also performing at The Kosciuszko Foundation, a Polish cultural organization on the Upper East Side.

Ms. Zaryan, who was born and lives in Warsaw, feels at home when the audience is filled with Poles, many of whom live in the neighborhood. “I’ve been visiting New York a few times, and I’ve made a group of Polish friends that I try to meet with every time I’m there,” she said. “They always come and support me when I play, which is really great.”
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Courtesy of Tim SchreierA photograph of The Bowery in the 19th century showing the elevated railroads.

Kerri Culhane’s lightning-speed, three-minute presentation at the Community Board 2 meeting held at Our Lady of Pompeii Church on Monday provided little indication of the vast research she has gathered in seeking to create a Bowery National Historic District which would span the approximately mile-long avenue, which runs from Chatham Square to Cooper Square .

Currently, individual buildings on the Bowery including The Bowery Savings Bank and Bouwerie Lane Theater have been designated National Historic Landmarks, along with limited portions of the Bowery being included in already designated National Historic Districts. The effort is being co-sponsored by the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors and The Two Bridges Neighborhood Council.

Former NYC Landmarks Preservation Commissioner Anthony Tung has described the “disjointed beauty” of the assemblage of buildings which line the former Native American foot path and later road leading to Peter Stuyvesant’s farm or “bouwerie” from which the street took its name.
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An early photo of a Native American trail from the Inwood section of Manhattan Island. Photo by W.L. Calver, originally published 1922.

Plans to pedestrianize Astor Place and expand Cooper Square Park, which were presented to Community Boards 2 and 3 on January 6th, are moving toward approval from the city’s Public Design Commission. A few wrinkles must be smoothed out, however, before the blueprints can be handed over to a contractor. Perhaps the most interesting community petition made thus far is that an old Native American trail, which ran through the area, be memorialized in the new design.

The Local thought that in light of the request, this might be the perfect time to look at the oft-forgotten historical presence of Native Americans in the East Village.

Once upon a time, Manhattan was a remote offshoot of North America with dense forests full of wildlife, open fields overgrown with rich grass, and bountiful harbors teeming with oysters, lobsters, and fish.

According to Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, tribes of Lenape Indians set up camp on this bountiful land, which they called Lenapehoking or, “where the Lenapes dwell,” more than sixty-five hundred years ago. They moved about frequently in groups of roughly 200 people at a time, hunting deer and wild turkeys, fishing, and foraging for nuts and berries.

Some fifty-five hundred years later, they had established more static communities thanks, in large part, to agricultural advancements. When Europeans arrived in 1524, approximately 15,000 Lenape Indians of various tribes lived in what is now New York City.
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Kim Davis

Climbing the rickety, makeshift stairway of the century old former tenement building on East Third Street that houses the Nuyorican Poets Café there was little to foretell the treasure trove Kim Davis and I would encounter. Daniel Gallant, executive director of the Nuyorican, explained that few know of the existence of the archives we were set to explore, and even fewer got to view this lofty realm as the Café has no certificate of occupancy for the top three floors of the building, which are not open to the public and are used strictly for storage. Daniel described how poet Miguel Algarín, and the Café’s other founders, had acquired the building from LaMama Theater creator Ellen Stewart in 1980 and established a venue where Lower East Side poets, playwrights and musicians could present their work.

After Daniel unlocked the padlock fastened to a small piece of plywood serving as a makeshift door leading to the third floor, we crouched to squeeze through the narrow entryway. As we ascended the stairs, the exposed brick walls were crowded with posters, paintings and costume designs from former productions held in the performance space occupying the first two floors of the building. Reaching the top of the stairs we entered a dimly lit, open loft space crammed in virtual disarray with a treasure trove of costumes crowded on racks, stage props, banners, posters and a vast collection of bric-a-brac accumulated over more than thirty years.

Costume designers have borrowed some of these period outfits for use in recent films. A large sign for one of the Nuyorican’s landmark productions, “Julius Caesar Set in Africa,” hung on the wall. As we wandered about the floor, it was difficult to appreciate everything. Exposed brick walls, fireplace mantles, thick wooden rafter beams were the only remains of the former railroad apartments that had existed in the building’s former tenement incarnation.

Dan regaled us with the history of numerous Nuyorican productions which had their sets and costumes created in this space. Tony Award winning playwright and actor Sarah Jones began her career with her first solo show, “Surface Transit” at the Nuyorican in 1998. She recently returned for a two week engagement after a Broadway run of “Bridge and Tunnel.” A sewing machine, paint cans, bolts of fabric, containers holding glitter, jars full of buttons, rolls of yarn and thread were evidence of the many hours that artists and writers like Sarah Jones “Bridge and Tunnel” and Miguel Piñero (“Short Eyes”) labored in the space. Read more…

Rachel Ohm Dancers rehearse for this weekend’s continuation of “Body Madness” at Danspace in St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery.

As a warm-up, Mariangela Lopez instructs her dancers to walk across the hardwood floor of St. Mark’s Church without music. They begin slowly and as they progress to the opposite end of the room their movements become more pronounced. They stretch and contort their bodies, reaching to the sky and crawling on the floor, moving around and with each other.

When the music finally comes on, they are scattered to different parts of St. Mark’s. One dancer is in the upstairs vestibule, another in the risers on the side, and some are on the floor.

They are preparing for their next performance with the Danspace Project, a contemporary dance studio that has been performing in St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery since 1974, in a space that is also home to poetry and theater projects while still being a practicing Episcopal Church.

Last year Danspace executive director Judy Hussie-Taylor started the Choreographic Center Without Walls, an effort to bring dance curators, choreographers and artists together for a series of performances she calls “platforms”. One year later and the project has become an important part of what Danspace is all about.
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Dan Glass Saxophonist Darius Jones and Kirk Knuffke on cornet lead the Kirk-Jones Quintet duiring a performance at the University of the Streets, the cultural center that has thrived for four decades.

A tumble of snare snaps and clarinet wails escaped the second-floor windows above the restaurant 7A on a recent Saturday night. A garbage truck and police car replied with a snort and a whoop. Jazz was happening up there, in a place called the University of the Streets.

Neighborhood folks know the tagged glass door, the kitchen-bright vestibule on East Seventh Street and maybe the lighted sign mounted next to it But few know what is on the six floors above, where a karate dojo, artist studios, and until recently a pigeon coop, operate along with a small amphitheater that hosts an open jam session that has taken place every Friday and Saturday night since 1969.

It’s a remarkably consistent run by nearly any measure, but all the more impressive for taking place here in the center of the in the East Village, which has been on an express track of socioeconomic change for the past 40 years.

“This place is an institution,” said Robert Anderson, 57, a Saturday night house bassist who is built like a light heavyweight. “And we’re trying to get it back to how it used to be, back when those guys was comin’ down – C-Sharpe, Barry Harris. Monk used to come through here, Dizzy – everybody used to come through here.”
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Crystal BellAfter years of complaining about the rat problem in this vacant lot on East First Street, residents will welcome the BMW Guggenheim Lab to the site this summer.

For Ann Shostrom, a local artist and resident of 35 East First Street, the constant screams and shrieks outside her window have become a nightly lullaby. No, her block isn’t particularly violent or dangerous, but it does have a huge problem, or more like thousands of little, scampering ones.

The residents on the block all seem to agree that the rat infestation on First Street between First and Second Avenues is the worst they have ever seen. And chances are if you’ve walked past the vacant lot located on 33 East First Street, then you probably feel the same way.

“I’m so acquainted with the rats now that I’m not afraid of them anymore,” said John Bowman, a professor at Pennsylvania State University and Ms. Shostrom’s husband. “We start to recognize some of them. There’s a big guy I call Bruno. But there are just so many of them. Kids on the block have had a rat safari. It’s dangerous.”

So Ms. Shostrom and her husband decided to take action and in 2008, created First Street Green, a grassroots organization dedicated to cleaning up the lot and turning into a community sculpture park. They raised funds through summer bake sales, art shows and benefits, but progress was slow. But their project received an unexpected boost last year, when the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, decided that the block’s eyesore was the perfect place for their 5,000-square-foot traveling urban lab.

“They have money, and we need something done about the site,” said Ms. Shostrom. “With this economy, the city doesn’t have the money and the Parks Department certainly doesn’t have the money, so this was just perfect for the community.”
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