Lower east side, lower east side…. What’s in the lower east side?! That is what was going through my head as I read the assignment. Ok, well Union Square. And then what? I later discovered there’s more to that part of town than just the square and the park. There’s “Alphabet City,” which I had not realized were the avenues that were named for letters, as well as lots and lots of galleries. Two out of our three interviewees spoke to us extensively about the museums and galleries that displayed different types of art. One said there were heritage museums dispersed around the area, we just had to find them. The third interviewee, an employee at the Blue Man Group, spoke to us mostly about street art. He suggested many places where art is expressed on the walls and on the street corner rather than behind glass at a closed off museum. He told us of a mural with painted cats smoking and doing drugs (on 3rd st and avenue B) and of a man who plays strictly bass guitar and allows for other people to bring their instruments to join him. He (the interviewee) made a point to say that the there are many places to see art in a room, but he preferred the more prominent street displays.
Our walking journey began in Union Square park, we thought it to be the center of the neighborhood. And it happened to be really convenient to get to. From there we wandered around, a little more south and east with every turn. In order to find people not too busy to share their thoughts with us, we tried to leave the busy areas behind and look for the side streets where there are more houses than stores.
Whilst walking through these parts, I the thing that caught my eye was the architecture of the houses. They all looked very much alike, something I am not used to in my Long Island neighborhood. Most buildings were only a couple of floors, about 3 or 4, very unlike the skyscrapers that dominate further downtown. They were all made of a dark brick and had similar stoops in the front. The door frames were the most intriguing part. They were very elaborate, even the ones that seemed to be worn. Mostly white, if I recall correctly, and stretching down into Greek-themed doorposts like the pictures below.
If you ignore the Frankenstein, you will see that the doorposts on either side look very much like columns of Greece as well as Rome, only less round and more box-like. The Greco-Roman theme even extended to the inside of lobbies as in the picture below. Looking carefully, you can see the same type of columns and decorations along the walls. It may not have been interesting to anyone else, but the oneness in feature caught my eye immediately.
Just a side note, I noticed that none of the apartment buildings had doormen or any type of security. Just a little ways north of where we stood, in the Upper East Side, basically every building had a door man, so why the change? It was a great contrast in my mind the differences between neighborhoods thought they were in such a small radius of each other.
An entertaining up side to all of the walking were the leftover Halloween decorations that were still up. We made some interesting little friends as we walked through the neighborhood and enjoyed the collective creativity of the lower east siders.
