I can still clearly remember a time when I considered anything East of Astor Place very, very far away. Manhattan itself is such a tiny island, but it’s easy to let your personal universe here become even tinier. It’s odd, but that’s one of the things I absolutely adore about this city. Small as it is, Manhattan is still divided into very distinctive neighborhoods, and within those neighborhoods exist hundreds of communities that are constantly jostling against each other. I’ve lived in the East Village for the last two years, and so I’ve grown accustomed to this kind of melange living: within a handful of blocks you can move from a string of Ukrainian restaurants to a neighborhood with signs almost entirely in Spanish, passing hipsters and punks and colorfully dressed children along the way. The East Village isn’t even its own little world; it’s its own universe.
As with most neighborhoods, the East Village has its celebrities. Because it’s Manhattan there are the actual celebrities: Chloe Sevigny, for example, or Katie Holmes, who’s been living in the American Felt Building on 13th between 3rd and 4th avenues recently. But there are also the local celebrities that you start to recognize if you’ve been around long enough. Though he left the city a few months ago, let us not forget the Spiderman pedicab driver who used to draw so much attention on St. Mark’s. Another one of my other favorites is the lanky, scraggly-haired dude who walks around Tompkins screaming at the musicians and skateboarders. The other day I was reading there and a skater kid chased him out of the park with the deck raised above his head. The guy kept screaming about how, in the 70s, his skateboard was a piece of plywood with a roller-skate attached.
I think I was the only one who looked up from my book to watch. I’ve lived here for four years, but I guess that’s not long enough to have perfected effortless nonchalance the way practiced New Yorkers have.
As an NYU student, it wasn’t always easy to feel welcome in the East Village. It’s not hard to see why, since the university has encroached upon its territory in such an aggressive and brazen manner. The narrative is much more complicated than The Corporate Man vs. The Little People, but that’s how it often gets broken down. I sometimes wish that the residents would accept the nuances of NYU and its students in the same way they do the nuances of their neighborhood. Not all NYU students are obnoxious, trust fund douches in the same way not everyone who lives in the East Village is Ukrainian or Hispanic or a washed up punk. The best part about the East Village is its multifaceted nature, its willingness to accept strangeness. I moved to New York in 2006 because of that kind of attitude, and in the few times I’ve received harsh criticism for simply being affiliated with NYU, it was hard not to bristle at the perceived hypocrisy. There were times I wanted to scream, “I pay rent and taxes here, I vote here, I care deeply about neighborhood issues! I’ve been to community board meetings, investigated noise control laws and I buy my coffee from Mud, not Starbucks! Why can’t I be your neighbor?”
Luckily most people’s answer to that question has always been, “You can be.” Just ask the employees of my local deli, or the women at my Laundromat, or the girls who live in the apartment above mine. It was because of the close-knit neighborhood spirit in the East Village that I became interested in hyperlocal news in the first place, obsessively reading blogs like EV Grieve so that I could learn everything about my area. I became involved in the New York Times Local: East Village project, which received its own share of neighborhood criticism, but I think ultimately will function as a really important and wonderful resource for the passionate and thriving communities that live here. There is something wild left in the spirit of this neighborhood; it seeps from the flowers in the Alphabet City community gardens or shines when the sun hits the murals at a certain angle. It’s this wildness that I think residents are most afraid of losing, but we shouldn’t be afraid of losing something that is so organic, so intrinsically connected to every person and place that exists in this area. Things will inevitably change, but that spirit, that history, never will.
I purposefully picked my neighborhood in San Francisco because I’d heard it’s the SF equivalent of the East Village. While becoming increasingly gentrified and full of hipsters, it still has its share of immigrants, artists and writers. I hear they have their own hyperlocal blog scene out there, and I’ve begun to add those blogs into my Google Reader recently. It’s an attempt to begin to ambiently recreate the community I built for myself in the East Village, something I’m going to miss like hell.
You can move someplace else but once you’ve fallen in love with it I don’t think you ever really leave New York, even if at some point that love began to feel like something different, something toxic even. Like the comparisons that arise when you enter a new relationship while still in love with someone else, when you love New York, you can’t help but search for places in its image. It makes moving and moving on just a little bit easier.
In two weeks The Mission will officially be my new East Village. I hope it’s as kind to me as the East Village has been these past two years.
Love this.
Agree with Sam, and Amen to the whole thing.
I agree with Sam and Vanessa. I love this.