14th and B: Don’t be fooled by the above photograph’s old-fashioned feel — this homey neighborhood is alive and well in the East Village of Manhattan! I shot this on the corner of 14th Street and Avenue B in 2010.
Basics of Alphabet City Boundaries: Historically between Houston Street and 14th Street, and spanning from Avenues A to D; current-day northern boundary has been pushed up to 23rd Street. School District: 1 Zip Code: 10009 How to Get There: L train to First Avenue; various buses, including the 14A and 14D.The neighborhood of Alphabet City is generally considered to be extinct from the face of Manhattan.
Although this perception is understandable, it is simply untrue.
Located on the Lower East Side within the East Village, the area admittedly does become difficult to distinguish from the neighborhoods surrounding it.
But it is Alphabet City’s vibrant history that separates it from the rest of the East Village.
Below, the famous neighborhood’s past, present, and future will be explored through three major lenses:
1. Bohemia or Loisaida?: Contrasting Cultures of Alphabet City From 1970-1990
2. Love Thy New Neighbor: Current Demographics of Alphabet City
3. A Lasting Legacy: Culture and Politics in Alphabet City
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Bohemia or Loisaida?
In the beginning, there were the Europeans.
Starting in the mid-1800s, the area encompassed by Alphabet City was home to working class German, Polish, Irish, and Ukrainian.
But in the early 1960s, a new class arrived: the Puerto Ricans.
Settling mainly along the East River on Avenues C and D, Puerto Rican influence in the area became so strong that the Eastern section of Alphabet City was nicknamed “Loisaida” (a mix of English and Spanish meaning “Lower East Side”). Avenue C was later officially named Loisaida Avenue.
Thus the New York Puerto Rican (“Nuyorican”) identity was born, centered at the Nuyorican Poets Café on 3rd Street between Avenues B and C, which was established in the 1970s.
The development of Nuyorican culture coincided with another movement essential to Alphabet City’s personality: the rise of the starving artists.
For anyone who has never seen the movie RENT, bohemia was a place of artistic creativity, social awareness, and rampant drug use. Members of the punk movement squatted in vacant apartments along Tompkins Square Park, organizing protests against brutal local police and attempting to turn vacant lots into public gardens.
But by 1988, tensions beween Alphabet City’s eclectic inhabitants came to a head in the Tompkins Square Riots. The conflict ended in a full-out war; homeless, squatters, blue-collar workers, Nuyoricans, and artists joined in the violent battle. Many protestors who had arrived on the scene were seriously injured, and the event generated immense negative public feedback.
The culture of the neighborhood had taken a hit; thus prompted the beginning of the end for rough-and-tumble bohemia and Loisaida in Alphabet City.
Tompkins Square Park: This shot, which I took in 2012, faces Avenue A.
Fast-forward to current-day: gentrification has taken Alphabet City out of its grunge days and transformed it into Manhattan’s newest up-and-coming hotspot.
As neighborhood crime dropped drastically in the 90s (almost 57% from 1993 to 2000) and local activists replaced drug dens with community gardens, the new wave of successful artists and professionals, and therefore gentrification, began. Today, the average resident of Alphabet City is a young, white professional with a high level of education who rents her apartment and may be attempting to start a small family.
The graph below, which I generated using Social Explorer Professional online, provides a rough estimate of the percentage of Alphabet City’s white population since the 1950s.
Despite the neighborhood’s current outward appearance, Alphabet City remains a safe haven for the city’s less-wealthy population. The average household income is only $45,610 a year, and a little over 24% live below the poverty line.
The most common professions for both females and males are in sales and office, which are a close second to jobs in entertainment, arts, design, sports, and media, indicating that the neighborhood has not lost its creative edge.
A Lasting Legacy
Despite gentrification, Alphabet City maintains an extremely active cultural and religious basis.
Although not known for being a widely religious neighborhood, Graffiti Church, a Baptist Church on East 7th Street, perfectly embodies the personality of the neighborhood. The church’s website states that “Graffiti Church began with serving children in the drug-controlled culture of Alphabet City in the early 1970’s”, highlighting the fact that the neighborhood has not lost sight of its gritty past.
A contributing factor to the increased popularity of Alphabet City has been the development of local businesses in the area, specifically upscale restaurants, dance clubs, and bars. The local bodegas, delicatessens, and taverns that used to rule the neighborhood have been pushed to the side, while business signs that used to be written in Spanish have been replaced with their English translations.
Each year, the Howl Festival takes place in and around Tompkins Square Park. Artists reserve large swaths of canvas, stretched along the fence of the park, and spend the day filling it up; these artists are free to utilize whatever medium they can get onto the canvas, including but not limited to acrylic paint, spray paint, collage, and photography.
Howl Festival 2011: Although I actually did not take the picture to the right (http://nythroughthelens.blogspot.com/2011_06_01_archive.html), this image perfectly embodies the eccentric nature of Alphabet City’s local art out to play in Tompkins Square Park.
The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS), located on Avenue C between 9th and 10th Streets, works to maintain the ideals of the squatters who helped to bring the neighborhood back from its drug-infested days of the 80s. The museum’s website states that its aim is to “preserve history and promote scholarship of grassroots urban space activism by researching and archiving efforts to create community spaces”. The museum staff accomplishes this by offering walking tours through buildings previously inhabited by squatter activists, helping cultivate community gardens, and providing lectures on promoting an eco-friendly East Village.
4th and B: I took this picture from a friend’s roof on 4th Street and Avenue B in 2010. This shot is facing the East River.
Although complications involving gentrification have been smoothed out over the past decade, incidents do occasionally arise that remind not only the local residents, but also New Yorkers as a whole, that the “improvement” of the city often comes at a cost. In 2012, a vacant one-story building on East 7th Street was torn down to permit the construction of a six-story building with condominiums on each floor. The vacant building was home to a large JIM JOE tag (a local graffiti artist whose work is well-known throughout the neighborhood — take note of it in the first photograph on this page!), leaving some Alphabet City residents disappointed at the continued destruction of their home’s personality.
The severe drop in the area’s Hispanic population has also led to a discussion between locals and academics; Claudio Remeseira, founder and director of the Hispanic New York Project at Columbia University, illuminated a new trend in Puerto Rican and Dominican social mobility in Alphabet City: as these groups become successful, they move out of Loisaida, which is contributing to the decrease in the Hispanic population.
Overall, isn’t it obvious?
Yes, the effects of gentrification on the neighborhood are undeniable and unfortunate…
Yes, the culture of Alphabet City will never be as rich or as diverse as it once was…
And yes, from here on out, privileged white children will be born to successful business owners and will grow up in insanely expensive apartments on Avenue B, never knowing that heroin-addicted artists and Nuyorican writers probably squatted in their kitchens fifty years ago…
But…
Traditional restaurants act as reminders of the influence of both Hispanic Loisaida and the environmentally conscious punk squatters.
Community gardens hide between four-story walk-ups blocks from the East River, and artists come out to play at the Howl Festival each summer.
The homeless still gather each night in Tompkins Square Park, and although they are significantly better behaved than their predecessors, they’ve scolded me for treading on “their turf” after dark.
Alphabet City is alive and well.
9th and A: Finally, I took this one on 9th Street and Avenue A in 2010.
