Alphabet City - Manhattan
From Comatose and Dead to Comfortable and Decent.
A fair number of New Yorkers would argue that Alphabet City, named for its lettered avenues—A, B, C, and D, running from Houston Street up to 14th—isn’t really a neighborhood at all, but rather part of Manhattan’s East Village.
Like Chinatown, the Bowery, Little Italy, and even Nolita, it once belonged to the great catchall of the Lower East Side, and before that to the tidal flats of Stuyvesant Meadows. Over time, each has evolved into its own distinct enclave. Well, maybe not Nolita. Throughout the city’s perpetual reinvention, it’s helpful, if not necessary, to break it into discrete, manageable chunks, embracing what Fran Lebowitz calls a “crazed naming of extremely specific areas of the city” as a way to understand the larger whole.
From the predominantly Irish immigrants who worked the shipyards at the river’s edge, to the German population that replaced them, drinking in the beer gardens along Avenue B, to the beatniks, hippies, and anarchists, to the Puerto Ricans who call it Loisaida (Spanglish for Lower East Side), the neighborhood has gone through several incarnations.
Today, despite the obvious effects of gentrification (you can practically smell the Aperol Spritz wafting down St. Mark’s Place), the neighborhood still retains some of its outlier character. Sure there may be more boutiques, multiple dog runs and a Viking Waffle place, but there is also what must be the city’s highest concentration of community gardens, the still thriving Nuyorican Poets Café and the random neon leotard wearing individual sprinting down the middle of Avenue B.
Even if the avenues that were once said to stand for “Alive, Breathing, Comatose, and Dead” now, in the words of writer George Pendle, stand for “Affluent, Bourgeois, Comfortable, and Decent,” Alphabet City remains a unique and vibrant corner of the city.
The Beginning of the Alphabet
The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 established Manhattan’s famous grid of numbered east–west streets and intersecting north–south avenues. The grid, which I’ve written about before, imposed a geometric logic on the streets above Houston. While everything to the south was already a lost cause, a jumble of crooked roads, uneven lots, and off-kilter intersections, to the north there would be order. Except, of course, at the edges, where the contours of the shoreline made precision impossible.
In particular, there was the bulge at Manhattan’s eastern shoreline, starting at Corlear’s Hook, tapering down at 14th Street, and finally leveling off near 23rd. To account for this bulge, once home to Manhattan’s greatest salt marsh, the commissioners added lettered avenues: A, B, C, and D.
In the beginning, the lettered avenues extended as far north as 18th Street, disappeared, then resumed again where the island widened on the Upper East Side. Avenue A and Avenue B were eventually renamed York Avenue and East End Avenue in uptown Manhattan. After World War II, the construction of Stuyvesant Town reduced the lettered avenues to their current fourteen-block stretch.
“The early planners succeeded in putting their city in a straight-jacket from which it has not escaped, from which perhaps it can never escape.”
- Lewis Mumford
The Dry Dock District
By the early 19th century, the deep, protected waters of the East River were identified as the perfect place to build and repair the ships that had become the engine of the city’s economy. The shoreline was extended, the marsh was buried under several feet of landfill, and massive iron foundries, coal yards, and ship docks filled the once-pristine estuary. It became the heart of the country’s shipbuilding industry, teeming with sailmakers, chandlers, rope walks, and dozens of other specialized trades.
It was home to America’s first dry dock and boatbuilders like Smith & Dimon and William H. Webb constructed massive shipyards, which turned out packets, side-wheelers, ferryboats, steamships, and ironclads. But it was the clipper ships—narrow-hulled, sleek sailboats with names like Gazelle, Sea Witch, Comet, Invincible, and Swordfish—that drew the most attention. Sacrificing carrying capacity for speed, they were prized for quickly transporting high-value freight. Clippers dominated the tea trade and supplied San Francisco’s booming mining population with necessary supplies during the Gold Rush.
Tompkins Square Park
The original Commissioners’ Plan had designated several blocks from 7th to 10th Streets between First Avenue and the river for a wholesale produce and livestock market. Those plans never materialized. Instead, in an effort to spur residential development, the city built a park.
Tompkins Square Park, which opened in 1834, was named after Daniel D. Tompkins, the former Vice President and New York governor whose name also adorns Staten Island’s Tompkinsville, Brooklyn’s Tompkins Park, Tompkins County, a handful of War of 1812 forts, and even a Masonic lodge. Not bad for a man who served two terms and died at just 50 years old.
For nearly a century, the 10-acre park was the only public space on the entire Lower East Side, serving as a stage for recreation, entertainment, and political unrest. Demonstrations against food shortages erupted in 1857, and the 1863 Draft Riots spilled into its grounds. Three years later, all its trees were cut down when the city converted it into a parade ground for the Seventh Regiment. By the 1870s, however, it was functioning as a public park once again.
An 1873 issue of Harper’s Weekly called the park “the grand plebeian plaza of New York City,” and described its atmosphere:
The great square is the attractive centre of the whole neighborhood—a reservoir of cool air, calling laborers out of their tenement homes as soon as they have eaten supper… Human life is uncovered here, and takes its last draught of air before it retires to hired chambers, too often in stifling inside bedrooms.
That same year, during the depths of a depression, seven thousand unemployed workers, women, and children gathered in the park to march on City Hall. They demanded everything from a stoppage of wintertime evictions to reforms of child labor laws. Their permit to assemble had been quietly revoked the night before, though few in the crowd knew it.
When they gathered, they were met by 1,600 police officers, many on horseback, who charged the protesters. Samuel Gompers, who would later found the American Federation of Labor (AFL), described the scene as “an orgy of brutality.”
Tompkins Square remained a focal point for protest throughout the 20th century. During the 1930s, Communists staged demonstrations for housing. In the late 1960s, it became a countercultural gathering ground, hosting be-ins, antiwar rallies, and concerts from bands like the Grateful Dead, Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix, and Ornette Coleman.
In 1966, under the canopy of a massive American Elm at the park’s center, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada led a cadre of saffron robed tambourine banging devotees (and Alphabet City resident Allen Ginsberg) in America’s first Hare Krishna chant.
SQUAT
Two decades later, the neighborhood looked very different. By the 1980s, the Lower East Side was among the neighborhoods hit hardest by New York’s fiscal crisis. Like the South Bronx, it was subjected to “planned shrinkage,” a policy that deprioritized services and maintenance in poorer neighborhoods. Hundreds of squatters were living in more than thirty abandoned buildings stretching from 14th Street to Houston. Many of these buildings had been left to decay or were deliberately torched by landlords hoping to collect insurance before surrendering them to the city after years of unpaid taxes.
The squatters were a mix of original tenants who couldn’t afford to relocate and activists who saw occupying buildings as a political stand against gentrification. Illegal occupation was often preferable to the gangs and “shooting galleries” that plagued the buildings, so the city often turned a blind eye and, in some cases, even sanctioned “homesteading.” Tenants could stay if they agreed to renovate within a set time frame, file paperwork, and pass inspections.
By the late 1980s, however, as property values rose, pressure mounted to clean up the neighborhood. Tompkins Square Park had become, in the words of Jonathan Mahler, “the nexus of New York’s colliding social and economic forces.”
Resident complaints about the park’s open-air drug market and large unhoused population, led the Parks Department to impose a 1 a.m. curfew on the previously 24-hour park. On July 31st, 1988, 50 officers attempted to clear the park and were beaten back by protesters. A week later, the city returned with overwhelming force. An initial wave of 150 officers, many with their badge numbers taped over, was joined by another 450 in full riot gear. In a scene reminiscent of 1873, police on horseback rode through the streets, indiscriminately clubbing protesters, bystanders and journalists alike.
While Mayor Koch initially defended the police, the release of a videotape by Lower East Side documentarian Clayton Patterson showing the brutality forced him to reverse course. Patterson’s footage led to indictments of several officers, the removal of the local precinct captain, and a reorganization of the NYPD.
SQUAT AGAIN
Seven years later, this time under Mayor Giuliani, the police were back. On May 30, 1995, in what The New York Times described as “a show of force befitting a small invasion,” 250 police officers in riot gear, supported by an armored vehicle, stormed East 13th Street and seized two longtime squats.
As Lucy Sante wrote at the time:
In destroying the squats New York is destroying homes, punishing initiative, undoing community improvement, criminalizing hard work, squelching ambition and killing hope and serenity. In other words, it is attacking itself.
Representing the squatters, lawyer Samuel Cohen unsuccessfully argued that the residents should be allowed to stay under the doctrine of “adverse possession,” more commonly known as squatters’ rights. Still, the negative press and enormous cost (estimated at $1 million) to clear the buildings tempered the city’s efforts.
In 2002, the city agreed to sell the remaining squats to the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board for one dollar each. The group took out loans on the squatters’ behalf to bring the buildings up to code, converting the once decaying properties into affordable housing.
C-Squat, one of the most famous, completed legalization in 2010 and now houses the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS).
LEAD BELLY TO RUPAUL
The Lower East Side was not only a center of political agitation but also of creative expression and was home to several prominent artists.
Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, was born in Mooringsport, Louisiana in 1888. A singer, accordionist, and master of the 12-string guitar, he spent much of his early life in and out of prison.
“No Lead Belly, no Beatles” - George Harrison
While serving a sentence in Angola prison for attempted murder, he was discovered by folk archivists John and Alan Lomax. Released in 1935, Lead Belly moved to New York and settled with his wife Martha at 414 East 10th Street. Though he was sent to jail yet again, this time to Rikers for stabbing a man in a bar fight, he became a fixture of the city’s folk revival, even landing a weekly slot on WNYC’s Folk Songs of America.
You can hear some excerpts from those shows here.
A decade later, another legend arrived. From 1950 to 1954, Charlie “Bird” Parker lived in the ground-floor apartment at 151 Avenue B, directly across from Tompkins Square Park.
For Parker, who had never lived in the same spot in the city for more than a few months, settling into the Alphabet City apartment, far from the clubs, studios, and uptown dealers, marked a rare attempt at domestic stability. He made a home with his partner Chan, her daughter from a previous marriage, and the two children they would have together.
But it didn’t last. Parker lost his cabaret license in 1951, forcing him to spend much of those years on the road. In March 1954, their daughter Pree died of congenital heart failure. Parker attempted suicide twice. The family moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania, and Chan and Charlie separated soon after. Suffering from depression and cirrhosis, Parker contracted pneumonia and died at age 34—a year and a week after his daughter.
A few blocks south of Parker’s house, Slugs’ Saloon (or Slugs’ in the Far East) was one of the city’s most famous jazz hangs. The club which was in operation from the mid 1960s to 1972 hosted Sun Ra every Monday Night gig. Albert Ayler recorded a live album there. Most famously, it was the bar where 33 year old trumpeter Lee Morgan was shot and killed by his wife, Helen, a story that is the subject of the fantastic documentary “I Called Him Morgan.”
Soon after, the bar’s owners shut down the club, a decision that was prompted as much by the violence outside their front door as the shooting inside.
By the late 1970s, Alphabet City was becoming known for its nascent punk and no wave scene and for the drag shows that drew the likes of Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The Pyramid Club, which opened in 1979 on Avenue A, was at the center of it all. Its stage hosted experimental theater, Madonna’s earliest gigs, Nirvana, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and a then-unknown RuPaul.
SIGHTS AND SOUNDS
This week’s audio starts out with church bells, captures some sound from the General Slocum memorial fountain in Tompkins Square Park before heading into several community gardens where the Lungs Harvest Arts festival was happening.
FEATURED PHOTOGRAPHER
I was lucky enough to spend a couple of hours this week in the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room for Rare Books and Manuscripts in the New York Public Library looking through contact sheets and prints from Geoffrey Biddle’s Alphabet City work, a documentary project on the Puerto Rican community of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Biddle, who was the Assistant Chair of the Photography Department at Parsons School of Design from 1994 to 2000, made a body of work in the neighborhood in the 1970s, when it was, in his words, “the largest heroin market in the world.” When he tried to pitch the project to various editors nobody was interested. A decade later, Biddle returned to the neighborhood to try to find some of the subjects of his pictures, interview them, and re-photograph them. The result is the 1992 book, Alphabet City.
I really enjoyed going through Biddle’s archive, full of beautifully printed photos of people hanging off of fire escapes, playing dominoes and stickball, boxing, kids riding in shopping carts and the scene in a decidedly grittier Tompkins Square Park. My favorite thing, though, was a small red notebook filled with Biddle’s meticulous script with everything from the contact info of his subjects to small diagrams suggesting the cropping and layout of his book to his sometimes conflicted thoughts on the project.
Here are some images from the book which was published by the University of California Press and appears to be out of print.
Biddle’s website features some excerpts from the interviews he conducted with his subjects and is well worth checking out.
ODDS AND END
Richard Sandler’s 2004 documentary Brave New York chronicles 12 years of transformation in the East Village and Alphabet City. As Sandler describes it, the film captures how “this durable, lusty neighborhood survives in spite of a real estate gold rush that has excluded all but the well-to-do.”
In the early 2000s, Bob Arihood ran the Neither More Nor Less blog, featuring photos taken in and around Tompkins Square Park. The blog, which had started as a project focusing on Jim Power the legendary local street artist known as the Mosaic Man, turned into an archive of the neighborhood documenting the “itinerant travelers, street drinkers, punks, poets and sidewalk sleepers that once proliferated in the East Village but these days make up a vanishing tribe.” (NY TIMES)
An exhaustive resource for the neighborhood’s architecture:
https://www.villagepreservation.org/
EV Grieve, your source for all Lower East Side related news.
I cannot think of Alphabet City without hearing in my head The Fugs’ classic “Slum Goddess,” which is not on the album “The Belle of Avenue A.”
I usually hung west of First Avenue, but I’d go anywhere for a good egg cream!
Thanks, as always, for your research and your swell photos, Rob!
Great stuff. I loved how Thurston Moore described the neighborhood in his recent autobiography. I think he lived there in the early to mid 1980s.