For over half a century, The East Village neighborhood of New York City – E.14th Street to E. Houston Street -- has been known as the counter-culture capital of the world and center of radical arts and activism in America.

Many are not aware that this neighborhood was actually considered part of the historic Lower East Side until the 1960s and 70s, when the term "East Village” was coined as a real estate marketing ploy to soften the area's working-class, low-income roots and breath new economic life into the neighborhood.

The Lower East Side has always been associated with slums, poverty, and licentious vice while Greenwich Village has always been associated with wealth, affluence, and intellectualism.

Even though these contrasting neighborhoods bordered each other geographically for close to two hundred years, it wasn't until the counter-cultural 1940s and 50s that the two began to be perceived as complementary, as artists and students moved in.

The term “East Village” took hold by the 1980s, and by the time gentrification was in full swing in the 1990s, and a border between the East Village and the Lower East Side had been commonly accepted to exist along E. Houston Street.

PRE-REVOLUTION:

The legendary street we know as the Bowery ( a derivitive of the Dutch word for "farm", bouwerij) was at one time a Native American footpath which wound through swampy marsh and thick forest between modern day Battery and Central Parks.

8th Street (and what is now called St. Marks Place between 3rd avenue and avenue A), was a smaller path which crossed the Bowery path at modern-day Astor Place.

The Dutch arrived for good in 1624 and expanded their settlement on the southern tip of Manhattan island by the mid 1600s. Farm land was cleared throughout most of modern day Lower East Side, East Village, and Gramercy.

As early as 1629, the Dutch used the site of a Native American fishing village called Sapokanikan as a tobacco plantation and farmland for freed African slaves, calling it "Greenwijk." After the English took the island in 1664, it soon became "Greenwich Village” and home to wealthy estates and mansions to the British elite.

The city expanded after the Revolutionary War, as people from all over the globe came to the New World to seek opportunity and fortune.

Unfortunately, the population began to outgrow the opportunities, and some of America's first and largest slums were created in the wake of the crushing waves of immigrants and fortune seekers.

The first slums were small enclaves, like the notorious Five Points on the southern boundary of the Lower East Side. But by the end of the 19th century, the slums had sprawled as far north as the modern day "East Village."

19th CENTURY:

One of the fortune seekers who arrived after the Revolutionary War was German-born Johan Jacob Astor. Astor made his first fortune in the fur trade but became the wealthiest American as a real estate speculator.

By the 1830s, he was selling real estate in the Astor Place area to some of the wealthiest politicians, merchants and industrialists of the era, including Vanderbilt, Delano and Gardiner. It became one of the most fashionable addresses in America.

Anticipating the future development of the island, the city adopted a street grid above Houston Street in 1811.

Between 1812 and 1816, 2nd and 3rd Avenues were developed and ran through what had once been Peter Stuyvesant's farm (roughly spanning modern day 4th and 23rd streets.)

E. 8th Street was created in 1826, and the first block of St. Marks Place (E.8th Street between 3rd Avenue and 2nd Avenue) was developed by English born real estate developer Thomas E. Davis in 1831.

Davis, capitalizing on the success of neighboring Astor Place, erected a handful of generous-sized townhouses on spec (some of which still exist), and sold them off to some of New York City's elite.

Residential development slowly expanded east along St. Marks Place between the 1830s and 1850, when Tompkins Square Park was opened to offer the wealthy community a large open-space recreational area.

Just to the east of the park, large industrial ironworks spread along the East River shoreline in what is today the Alphabet City section of the East Village.

By the end of the century, with the large influx of European immigrants arriving on the Lower East Side, many local estate owners started selling off their lots to tennement developers, and the area's working-class roots began to take hold.

CONTEMPORARY EAST VILLAGE:

After World War II, American Zeitgeist was at an all-time high, the US economy as booming and opportunities were once again opening up in big cities like New York.

The city, alive with culture and industry, attracted all sorts. Many arrived to attend local universities like NYU and Columbia. Many came to pursue arts and theater or to take advantage of the wide range of job opportunities, others to escape small town life, came simply for the excitement.

By the 1950s, students, artists, musicians, and free spirits of all persuasions moved into the and Greenwich Village and East Village area. Here they settled in among the remaining Ukrainian and Polish working-class and the newly arrived Puerto Rican immigrants who settled in Alphabet City.

A new era in Lower East Side history was born, and the impact of this collision had both positive and negative consequences on the future and legacy of the Lower East Side.

During the 50s, widely influential cultural movements emerged in the neighborhood, including Bebop, the Beatniks and the Abstract Expressionism; In the 60s, the “alternative” arts and theater experiments and radical activism; Nuyorican music, arts and poetry of the 1970s; the Urban Contemporary Graffiti and Pop artists of the 80s, truly an age of experimentation and creativity in America.

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