All You Need To Know About East Village April 08 2014
Until the 1960 the East Village did not exist as a distinct neighborhood, its eastern blocks were part of the sprawling Lower East Side, populated by Slavs, Eastern European Jews, Germans, and Latinos. Its western sector, around Astor Place, was a decaying remnant of a formerly aristocratic neighborhood.
In the 1950s a few beatniks moved in- Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg, among them- and during the next decade artists, writers, musicians, and other exponent of the counterculture were drawn here by low rents.
The blocks around St. Mark’s Place pulsed with intellectual energy: there were cafes, bookstores, theaters, coffee houses.
In the 1980s the neighborhood was beset by drug abuse and crime and also by tensions between cultural groups, of wich the 1988 Tompkins Square riots were an expression.
Since the 1990, as the city has recovered economically, the East Village has gentrified: coffee bars, condos, some elegantly designed, soar above remaining tenements.
In the Village’s heart, the New Museum of Contemprary Art is the only museum in Manhattan devoted exclusively to the work of living artists. It was the first institution in the city to exhibit such now prominent artists.
The city’s Ukrainian enclave stretches along Second Avenue form about East 4th to East 14th St. “Little Ukraine” reached a population of about 60.000 after World War II as Ukrainians.
