This Must Be the Place by Jesse Rifkin

Author:Jesse Rifkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2023-04-20T18:40:07+00:00

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For much of the 1800s, Alphabet City was part of a larger German immigrant neighborhood in what’s now the East Village, often referred to as Kleindeutschland, or “Little Germany.” But the neighborhood experienced a sudden, drastic change on June 15, 1904, when the PS General Slocum, a ship carrying 1,342 Kleindeutschland residents to a church picnic, caught fire and sank in the East River. Only 321 of them survived; until the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was the deadliest incident in the city’s history. With much of its population decimated, Kleindeutschland became an ever-changing patchwork of low-income immigrant communities, which at various points included Irish, Eastern European Jewish, Polish, Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, and Puerto Rican residents.

But with its cheap rents and no single community claiming dominance over the area, it became attractive to bohemians: folk singer Lead Belly lived at 414 East 10th Street between C and D for much of the ’40s; saxophonist Charlie Parker lived at 151 Avenue B from 1950 to 1954; around the same time, Beat poets and then-lovers Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs lived together at 206 East 7th Street between B and C (Jack Kerouac was a frequent houseguest). And as noted in Chapter One, folk singers Noel Paul Stookey and Tom Paxton lived together at 629 E. 5th Street, between B and C, in the early ’60s.

In 1964, poet Ed Sanders leased a former kosher butcher shop at 383 E. 10th Street between B and C for $50 a month and opened the Peace Eye Bookstore. In addition to selling poetry chapbooks and subversive literature, the Peace Eye was home to regular rehearsals and occasional performances by Sanders’s band, the Fugs. His bandmate Naftuli “Tuli” Kupferberg conveniently lived next door at 381; Sanders himself moved to the neighborhood in 1966 with his wife and daughter, renting an apartment at 196 Ave. A. Sanders later recalled that at the time, “the streets were safe enough to go down to the park and let our kids dance in the water fountains.”111

In 1966, a band shell was erected in Tompkins Square Park, with Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead among the early performers to grace its stage. Those shows were indicative of a larger shift within the neighborhood: As journalist Pete Hamill later wrote, “Many middle-class kids started coming to the neighborhood, to play for a while at poverty and rebellion. The truly poor resented them, because if they got into any real trouble they could always call Daddy for a check.”112

It was around this time that the phrase “East Village” was first applied to the portion of the Lower East Side above Houston Street—positioning the area as a hip alternative to Greenwich Village, whose bohemian stock was declining amidst the influx of tourists and Johnny-come-latelies. And of course, those tourists drew an increased NYPD presence that paid especially close attention to the sale and consumption of narcotics; the comparatively unpoliced “East Village” held no such risks for drug users. By 1967,

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