➊ST. MARK’S-IN-THE-BOWERY CHURCH (Corner of Second Avenue and Tenth Street)—Built in 1799, this is the oldest church site, but not the oldest church, in Manhattan. The adjoining Stuyvesant Street, laid out with a compass, is the only street in Manhattan to run exactly east-west. The street itself used to lead to Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant’s estate, which was here in the seventeenth century, stretching approximately from Avenue A to Third Avenue, and from Third to Fourteenth Streets.
Stuyvesant was the last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam before the Dutch surrendered to the English in 1664, and renamed this small town “New York.” He was dictatorial and racist; he owned forty slaves on his estate here. He died in 1672, and is buried in the vault on the north side of the church, visible from the cemetery. Seven generations of Stuyvesants are buried in the vaults in the church. The most notable person in the cemetery itself is former New York State Governor Daniel Tompkins, for whom Tompkins Square Park is named (see below).
The church itself has been progressive, supporting the Civil Rights movement, voter registration, prison reform, and opening the nation’s first lesbian healthcare clinic. Here, Amy Lowell and Edna St. Vincent Millay staged poetry readings; Isadora Duncan danced, and Andy Warhol screened his early films. The Black Panthers and Young Lords held meetings here in the 1960s.
The St. Mark’s Poetry Project dates back to 1966. Their New Year’s Day Poetry Marathons are world famous and, over the years, have featured Allen Ginsberg, Penny Arcade, Jim Carroll, and Eileen Myles.
The small space in front of the church was the place to go in the 1960s to find out what was going on in the Village. During the occupation of Tompkins Square Park by the New York City Police Department, and its fifteen-month closing in 1991 and 1992, a march started here denouncing the police’s verbal harassment of women, a constant occurrence.
➋FILLMORE EAST (105 Second Avenue)—The theater itself was knocked down in 1997, the old entrance being converted into the Emigrant Savings Bank. Bill Graham opened the Fillmore East in 1968, and it became one of the most famous rock ‘n’ roll clubs of the 1960s. Elton John, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, and Grace Slick all played here, with Joplin sometimes sleeping at Abbie Hoffman’s apartment at 30 St. Mark’s Place.
In 1969, the first staged performance of The Who’s Tommy played here, and one night John Lennon joined with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. When Lennon lived in the Village at 105 Bank Street, before moving uptown to the Dakota in 1974, he would hang out with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
The Fillmore East closed in 1971, later to be a gay discotheque called The Saint. Previously, in the 1920s, it was a silent movie theater, then the Loew’s Commodore movie theater, and a Yiddish theater in the 1930s. Many of the current theaters on Second Avenue, both theatrical and movie houses, were Yiddish theaters from the turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrant era.
➌ISAAC HOPPER HOME (110 Second Avenue)—This home honors the memory of Isaac T. Hopper, a major Quaker anti-slavery activist. He left the Quakers because they failed, early on, to be firmly anti-slavery. He came to New York City from Philadelphia to form the New York Association for Friends, a relief agency for slaves. He defended, in court, slaves being prosecuted under the Fugitive Slave Law. He eventually opened a bookstore on Pearl Street, selling some of his own writings against slavery.
Hopper was also active in reform for female prisoners, and he worked with the New York Prison Association in founding an early home for women coming out of prison.
After he died, a bequest was made in his memory in the 1850s; the house was purchased, and it continues to this day as a thirty-day facility for women after their release from prison. It has eleven beds, and is run by the Women’s Prison Association. They also run a larger apartment house on Avenue B adjoining Tompkins Square Park.
Isaac Hopper, an early abolitionist and underground-railroad developer. COURTESY OF PHOTOGRAPHS AND PRINTS DIVISION; SHOMBERG CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN BLACK CULTURE; THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY; ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS
➍77 ST. MARK’S PLACE—This building was unfortunately redesigned in 1997. In 1917, while living at 1622 Vyse Avenue in the Bronx, Leon Trotsky worked on the bottom floor for Novy Mir, the Russian dissident newspaper.
He marveled at American technology while waiting for the Russian Revolution to start. Trotsky worked as a journalist, gave lectures in German and Russian, and was meeting with Eugene Debs, head of the U.S. Socialist Party, to start another newspaper, when things heated up in Russia. He left New York in March 1917 to make history.
There was a big farewell dinner in his honor before he left at the old Broadway Central Hotel on Broadway and Mercer Street, which subsequently collapsed and was replaced by an NYU dormitory.
➎ALEXANDER BERKMAN AND THE ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF HENRY CLAY FRICK (340 East Fifth Street between First and Second Avenue)—In 1892 Alexander Berkman stayed at an apartment in this tenement to make bombs to assassinate the head of the Carnegie Steel Works, Henry Clay Frick, in order to avenge the murder of workers during a vicious strike in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Alexander used Johann Most’s bomb-making book and made two bombs. However, the first one didn’t work and he decided to shelve the bomb idea and instead buy a gun. He would serve 13 years in prison for this assassination attempt (known as an “attentat”) and ironically be denounced by Johann Most for it.)
➏WHO’S THAT GIRL? (232 EAST FOURTH STREET—This address has been replaced by 230 East Fourth Street due to the renovation of the building in the early 1990s. It was, however, a decaying walk-up where an unknown nineteen-year-old singer first lived when she came to New York City in 1978 with $37 in her pocket. The now multimillionaire Madonna lived in this roach-infested fourth-floor walk-up and went “dumpster diving” in the local garbage containers for food when she wasn’t begging restaurants for food (something many of the homeless and squatters in the area still do).
The renovation in the early 1990s replaced the windows and reopened the abandoned building so that it doesn’t quite have the contrast with Madonna’s current lifestyle that I was looking for. It’s a reminder, however, of the pyramid-scheme nature of capitalism; Madonna “made it,” but the rest of the neighborhood has not.
On the positive side, Madonna has given money to the antinuclear movement, the Central American Solidarity Movement, millions of dollars to the AIDS movement, and her videos have broken new ground in dealing with sexuality from a woman’s perspective. However, when compared to people like Penny Arcade or Victoria Woodhull, Madonna looks very tame.
Across the street towards Avenue A is 197 East Fourth Street, which housed the excellent Guardian newspaper in the 1960s before it moved to Chelsea (32 West 22nd Street) in the 1970’s. The Guardian was founded as the National Guardian in 1948, supporting the Henry Wallace for President Campaign and in the 1950s, was one of the only supporters of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. It was an essential read for political activists all over the country, usually being the only source of coverage of demonstrations. The newspaper was independent of any specific political party but strongly supported Communist countries and third world liberation movements. It was closed due to a lack of money in 1992 and has never been replaced. Sam Melville, who received a long prison sentence for a series of political bombings he did in the 1960s, worked for The Guardian. He would be killed in the 1971 Attica Uprising. His co-defendants, including Jane Alpert (author of the excellent account of their actions, Growing Up Underground), had an apartment at 235 East Fourth Street on the top floor. Unfortunately, on the day the group was arrested, the F.B.I. had taken an apartment at 240 East Fourth Street to observe their movements before moving in for the arrests. Sam’s apartment at the time of his arrest in 1969 was at 67 East Second Street.
➐BLACKOUT BOOKS (50 Avenue B)—This anarchist bookstore lasted eight years but went bust in 2000. It was started by four activists in the neighborhood, each paying $1,000. However, there were big disputes over the direction of the bookstore and whether homeless people should be allowed to live on the premises. After closing in 2000, it lasted for some years within the lobby of the off-off Broadway theater, Theater for the New City, which is located at 155 First Avenue and Ninth Street. Theater for the New City has persevered despite a large number of off and off-off Broadway theaters closing since the 1980s.
➑JUSTUS SCHWALB’S SALOON (50 East First Street)— This radical saloon existed from the 1880s through the 1900s and was run by Justus Schwalb, one-time president of the Social Revolutionary Club. Saloons were very important as meeting places to radicals and immigrants at the turn of the century. This one featured a low ceiling, lots of smoke, and a working gun above the bar.
Schwalb was dragged to jail in 1870 after leading a demonstration at Tompkins Square Park and singing the Marseillaise. He persuaded his club to bring German anarchist Johann Most to America, who started The Freiheit newspaper and later served as Emma Goldman’s mentor.
50 First Street—former site of Justus Schwalb’s Saloon. PHOTO BY BRUCE KAYTON
Most was one of the few who actually fit the anarchist stereotype of bomb-making agitator. In a fit of anger in an argument with labor organizer Samuel Gompers, he smashed his beer mug so hard against a table that the glass dented the wall, dents that are said to still be visible in the first-floor room.
➒CATHOLIC WORKER (36 East First Street)—The Catholic Worker was founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. It’s a welcome sight, opposed to the Yuppie cafes and apartments in the area.
Dorothy Day worked for The Masses successor, The Liberator. She got arrested several times for fighting for the right to vote at the White House. Though religious, she strongly opposed the church hierarchy, with those at the top being rich and divorced from the life of the average worker.
Starting their famous one-cent newspaper on East Fifteenth Street, its circulation soared to 150,000 by 1936, since it talked about issues important to average people during the depression: the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), strikes, communitarianism, and the evils of the wage system.
Farming communes were also organized, and houses of hospitality set up for food distribution and places to live. The Catholic Worker has been in this building since the 1960s, and its soup kitchen serves hundreds of men, with the women being served at the nearby Maryknoll House on East Third Street.
Dorothy Day died in 1980, but the radical Catholic perspective still continues in the one-cent Catholic Worker and pacifism and anti-draft work over the years. Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, remains a classic in the literature of religious-inspired radicalism.
➓TOMPKINS SQUARE PARK—Approaching the park along Avenue A, you’ll notice the new Yuppie cafes and businesses; you’ll also see the double-decker buses of the mainstream tour businesses—always a bad sign.
One hundred-three Avenue A is the building where Julius and Ethel Rosenberg lived in 1940, one year after getting married. Ethel became active with the Communist Party front group “The East Side Conference to Defend America and Crush Hitler,” which had an office at 137 Avenue B. Ethel helped organize a parade of seven thousand against Hitler and the Nazi Party, which drew one hundred thousand onlookers.
Tompkins Square Park was part of Stuyvesant’s Meadow in the early 1800s. It was essentially swamp and marshland, until a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant sold it to New York City. The Government spent $93,000 to buy it, fill in the swamps, and plant trees. They named it for Daniel Tompkins, a vice-president of the United States under James Monroe, a governor of New York State (1807–1816), and a person who fought to abolish slavery, liberalize the criminal code, and relieve the poor of militia duty.
The rich got first crack at this beautiful park in the early nineteenth century, as the real estate industry built a row of homes on Tenth Street (299–319 East Tenth Street) that sold for $10,000 apiece. The row would have continued around the rest of the park, but for the 1837 depression that took the boom out of the market; one could see the row ends before reaching Avenue B.
Instead, Irish and German immigrants moved into the area, many of whom worked on the docks on the East River. Living conditions were abysmal; in the 1850s there were many demonstrations at Tompkins Square Park against unemployment and low wages. The State Legislature didn’t like workers expressing their constitutional rights, so they paved over the parkland to make a military parade ground. However, the corrupt Tammany Hall (Democratic Party) head “Boss” Tweed used watered-down concrete and the new parade ground developed serious cracks over the next two years.
In January 1874, one of the most famous riots in the park occurred when the unemployed assembled in the park for a march to City Hall. Ten thousand workers and their families showed up, unaware that New York City had revoked the march permit the night before, and all hell broke loose. Police marched through the crowd on horseback, beating those who dared assemble, creating a bloodbath, prompting a strong New York Times editorial: “the forbearance and good humor of the police was admirable.”
Tompkins Square Park. PHOTO BY PETER JOSEPH
The following September, twenty-five hundred assembled to protest the police brutality.
In 1878, the parade grounds were turned into a park and ten thousand people attended its re-opening. One of those who fought to restore it as a park was Bernard Cohen, the grandfather of future NYC Parks Commissioner, and neighborhood destroyer, Robert Moses.
At the end of the nineteenth and early in the twentieth century, immigrants from Russia, Poland, and Eastern Europe arrived in this area, and many social service agencies followed. The Children’s Aid Society opened at 127 Avenue B in 1887. Children entering through the basement were sprayed with Larkspur, a disinfectant.
The Tompkins Square Park Library was built in 1904 at 331 East Tenth Street, featuring books in seven languages to serve the immigrants. The Boys Club Headquarters at 287 East Tenth Street opened in 1901, and a Young Women’s Settlement House opened in 1897, later changing its name to the Christadora House in 1914 and moving into 143 Avenue B in 1928.
The Christadora House featured free birth control, a library, swimming pool, and dental and health services. It was built to serve the community, and after being squatted in the 1960s by the Young Lords and the Black Panthers, it was sold in 1975 by the city in a sweetheart deal to a private investor who converted it into, what else, expensive apartments.
The Christadora House became a symbol of gentrification in the neighborhood. Many demonstrations in the 1980s and 1990s ended at this site for a round of window-breaking and protest.
Returning to the 1890s, the first municipal-run public baths in New York City were proposed for a corner of Tompkins Square Park but this was defeated by the community, which didn’t want buildings taking up valuable park space.
In the 1950s and 1960s, a new wave of immigrants arrived—Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Colombians—and public housing developments, named for Lillian Wald and Jacob Riis, went up east of the park. The area east of the park was eventually dubbed ‘Loisaida.’
In the 1960s, the hippies arrived, as did the Psycho delicatessen on 293 East Tenth Street, the first head shop in the area. The bandshell, erected in 1966, featured Jimi Hendrix, Santana, the Fugs, and an early incarnation of the Grateful Dead. It’s since been removed by the city.
Tompkins Square Park, 1989. Police protecting the rights of landlords. PHOTO BY CHRIS FLASH OF THE SHADOW
Abbie Hoffman’s first New York City demonstration was an anti-Vietnam War march in 1966, from Tompkins Square Park to Union Square. On Memorial Day of 1967, in a prelude to a history of fights with the police, local hippies and Puerto Ricans were stopped from playing conga drums as thirty-eight people were arrested after they linked arms and started resisting police violence. The judge ultimately threw out all charges, saying “this court will not deny equal protection to the unwashed, unshod, unkempt and uninhibited.” Ah, the 1960s!
In the 80s, the real estate industry tried to force out the poor by setting buildings on fire or abandoning them altogether. Rents increased from one to four hundred percent, giving birth to a very mixed neighborhood: squatters, anarchists, yuppies, and artists. The area had appealed to artists looking for low-rent options in Manhattan, like Greenwich Village many years before, but in the ’80s, the prices rose.
A major police riot occurred in August 1988; more than four hundred police officers, many covering their name tags with tape, beat up protesters who were protecting the rights of the homeless to live in the park. One hundred-forty-seven complaints were filed with the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and officially forty-four people were injured.
The overzealous police made the mistake of beating up local yuppies, reporters, and business owners. Local video artist Clayton Patterson taped the riot, generating much publicity. Even Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward admitted, “I don’t think there’s any excuse for what happened.” The mainstream media handled the affair as an aberration from typical police behavior, but those of us active in the fight to protect the park knew this was not the case.
The police occupation of the area lasted five full days, and the fights continue against homeless encampments in the park.
The year 1991 brought the famous Memorial Day Riot during a “Housing is a Human Right” concert. This battle between police and local residents served as a pretext for Mayor Dinkins to shut the park for “renovation” from June 1991 to August 1992. Police officers lined the sidewalks adjacent to the park by the hundreds, keeping people away from the large fence, alternately harassing women as they walked by.
Concert against police violence in Tompkins Square Park in the spring of ’94. PHOTO BY CHRIS FLASH OF THE SHADOW
The memorial service for homeless activist Terry Taylor, 1994. PHOTO BY CHRIS FLASH OF THE SHADOW
At a time when the city was laying off thousands of workers and cutting social services, more than $12 million was spent to maintain a large police presence, and to renovate the park to keep out the squatters and homeless. It was a cowardly move, part of the attack against the homeless all over the city, related to gentrification and a citywide “clean up” before the 1992 Democratic Convention came to town.
Hundreds tried to link arms around the park; there were protests all over the neighborhood. Acts of civil disobedience were committed, but the police enforced a rule that an activist’s second arrest would lead to jail time, as opposed to getting a ticket for a future court appearance. The tactic was effective in stifling dissent.
The city also vindictively knocked down, in August 1991, the famous bandshell on the Seventh Street side of the park, a few days before a “Save the Bandshell” concert was slated. Now, a temporary bandshell is erected each time an event is organized, and performers must use the city-owned sound system.
I was very active in the attempt to fight the closing of the park, and witnessed much police brutality and dirty tactics by the city. Though there was tremendous police repression, there was also much divisiveness among local activists; the initial meetings saw hundreds of people, but there was an inability to keep them inspired.
Father Kuehn, formerly at St. Brigid’s Church at 119 Avenue B, was a strong supporter; he presided over memorial services for homeless activist Terry Taylor in January 1994. Newly-elected Mayor Rudolph Guiliani had police arrest those carrying a mock coffin in Terry’s memory around the corner from the church. St. Brigid’s Church held many meetings on its front steps during the closing of the park for two straight summers in 1991 and 1992.
Other sites around the park were the old Nino’s Pizza at 131 St. Mark’s Place, which looked like a police precinct during the closing of the park. Its profits shot up, as those of other businesses around the park went down. Down the block from the former Nino’s Pizza was an open-air bar with the television on at 131 Avenue A (corner of Ninth Street). As we marched by during a small demonstration while the park was closed, both the demonstrators and the police stopped on a dime to watch an ABC-TV report about us live from in front of the park. Once the report ended, we resumed the protest. It was a surreal moment of television-watching in the modern media age, though well before Instagram, Twitter, and selfies. Also, at Kraemer’s Hall (134 East Seventh Street) in 1887 German anarchist Johann Most would give a speech advocating revenge for the execution of the Haymarket martyrs and serve ten months in prison for this speech on Blackwell’s Island (now known as Roosevelt Island). Emma Goldman would also speak at this 40-foot hall.
The Sarah Powell Huntington House at 347 East Tenth Street is run by the Women’s Prison Association as permanent housing for women just released from prison. The late Sarah Powell Huntington spent over seventy years on the Lower East Side and was an ancestor of Women’s Prison Association founder Isaac Hopper.
One hundred fifty-one Avenue B, between Ninth and Tenth Streets, was the residence of jazz great Charlie Parker from 1950 to 1954; the block was subsequently named Charles Parker Place.
⓫FORMER SITE OF THE CHICO MENDEZ COMMUNITY GARDEN (511-515 East Eleventh Street between Avenues A and B)—In 1997, before this area was even more heavily gentrified with million-dollar apartments, the city shut down this community garden and erected the current Del Este Village condominiums. It was a beautiful lush green space with great murals on the walls surrounding it. It represented an early defeat for the community garden movement, which had transformed hundreds of garbage-filled lots into green spaces. In 1999 Mayor Giuliani wanted to auction off 190 gardens across the city to the highest bidder. A mass movement rose up against this attempt with civil disobedience protests, lawsuits, and ultimately the purchase of 112 gardens for $4.2 million by the Trust for Public Lands and Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project. You could call this effort to preserve hundreds of gardens a victory won by “Lawyers, grass roots, and money.”
⓬ALLEN GINSBERG’S APARTMENT (437 East Twelfth Street, between First Avenue and Avenue A)—Mr. Ginsberg lived here in three apartments from 1975 to 1996 with Peter Orlovsky after ten years residence at 408 East Tenth Street. During this time period he toured with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, won the National Book Award in poetry, and taught at the Buddhist Naropa Institute in Colorado. He met his fellow Beat artists (Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady) while attending Columbia University in the 1940s. Mr. Ginsberg fought major battles against censorship of his poems both in the United States and around the world. His groundbreaking poems about his mother’s suicide, the counter-culture in America, and being gay are now taught to millions of students every year. Many sites from the East Village are in his poems. He also lived at 170 East Second Street, 704 East Fifth Street, 206 East Seventh Street, and was residing at 404 East Fourteenth Street when he died in 1997.
⓭30 ST. MARK’S PLACE—St. Mark’s Place served as the meeting place and hangout for all of those fleeing conventional society and flocking to the counter-culture.
This particular apartment building housed Abbie and Anita Hoffman in 1967, which Abbie described as a “$101 per month front row seat to the cultural revolution.” Here, in December 1967, Paul Krassner and the Hoffmans came up with the idea of the “Yippies,” or Youth International Party, as a vehicle to combat the “Convention of Death”: The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
Abbie was arrested six times for loitering on his own block. He organized, among other things in his long career as an activist, a be-in in Central Park, the levitation of the Pentagon, and helped end the Vietnam War.
One of his famous actions was dumping hundreds of dollar bills on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to watch the Wall-Streeters scramble and fight for the money, forcing them to act out a condensed version of what their lives were about.
His books live on, inspiring many of us who have continued organizing in the years after his death. We recall his sense of humor, zest for life, and belief in fighting for what is right. Many people flocked to this block to pay tribute to him after he died in 1989.
Across the street at 33 St. Mark’s Place was a clothing store called Manic Panic, a trendy East Village shop. To get an idea of the gentrification of the area, their rent went from $250 per month in 1977 to $3,000 per month in 1988, and they were forced to move to a basement on Seventh Street. Many other local businesses weren’t so lucky, and eventually were forced to close because of high rents.