East Village, Manhattan
The East Village is a neighborhood on the East Side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, New York. It is roughly defined as the area east of the Bowery and Third Avenue, south of 14th Street, and north of Houston Street. The East Village contains three subsections: Alphabet City, in reference to the single-letter-named avenues east of First Avenue; Little Ukraine, near Second Avenue and 6th and 7th Streets; and the Bowery, located around the street of the same name.
The present-day East Village was originally occupied by the Lenape Native people, and was then divided into plantations by Dutch settlers. During the early 19th century, the East Village contained many of the city's most opulent estates. By the middle of the century, it grew to include a large immigrant populationincluding what was once referred to as Manhattan's Little Germanyand was considered part of the nearby Lower East Side. By the late 1960s, many artists, musicians, students and hippies began to move into the area, and the East Village gained its own identity. Since at least the 2000s, gentrification has changed the character of the neighborhood.
The East Village is part of Manhattan Community District 3, and its primary ZIP Codes are 10003 and 10009. It is patrolled by the 9th Precinct of the New York City Police Department.
Unlike the West Village, the East Village is not located within Greenwich Village.
History
Early development
The area that is today known as the East Village was originally occupied by the Lenape Native people. The Lenape relocated during different seasons, moving toward the shore to fish during the summers, and moving inland to hunt and grow crops during the fall and winter. Manhattan was purchased in 1626 by the Dutch West India Company’s Peter Minuit, director-general of New Netherland.Most New Amsterdam colonists lived primarily below present-day Fulton Street, whereas north of it were a number of farms called bouwerij. Around these farms were a number of enclaves of free or "half-free" Africans, which served as a buffer between the Dutch and the Native Americans. One of the largest of these was located along the modern Bowery between Prince Street and Astor Place, as well as the "only separate enclave" of this type within Manhattan. These Black farmers were some of the area’s earliest settlers.
There were several "boweries" within what is now the East Village. Bowery no.2 passed through several inhabitants, before the eastern half of the land was subdivided and given to Harmen Smeeman in 1647. Peter Stuyvesant, the director-general of New Netherland, owned adjacent bowery no.1 and bought bowery no.2 in 1656 for his farm. Stuyvesant's manor, also called Bowery, was near what is now 10th Street between Second and Third Avenues. Though the manor burned down in the 1770s, his family held onto the land for over seven generations, until a descendant began selling off parcels in the early 19th century.
Bowery no. 3 was located near today's 2nd Street between Second Avenue and the modern street named Bowery. It was owned by Gerrit Hendricksen in 1646 and later given to Philip Minthorne by 1732. The Minthorne and Stuyvesant families both enslaved people on their farms. According to an 1803 deed, people enslaved by Stuyvesant were to be buried in a cemetery plot at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. The Stuyvesants' estate later expanded to include two Georgian-style manors: the "Bowery House" to the south and "Petersfield" to the north.
Many of these farms had become wealthy country estates by the middle of the 18th century. The Stuyvesant, DeLancey, and Rutgers families would come to own most of the land on the Lower East Side, including the portions that would later become the East Village. By the late 18th century Lower Manhattan estate owners started having their lands surveyed to facilitate the future growth of Lower Manhattan into a street grid system. The Stuyvesant plot, surveyed in the 1780s or 1790s, was planned to be developed with a new grid around Stuyvesant Street, a street that ran compass west–east. This contrasted with the grid system that was ultimately laid out under the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which is offset by 28.9 degrees clockwise. Stuyvesant Street formed the border between former boweries 1and 2, and the grid surrounding it included four north–south and nine west–east streets.
Because each landowner had done their own survey, there were different street grids that did not align with each other. Various state laws, passed in the 1790s, gave the city of New York the ability to plan out, open, and close streets. The final plan, published in 1811, resulted in the current street grid north of Houston Streetand most of the streets in the modern East Villagewere conformed to this plan, except for Stuyvesant Street. The north–south avenues within the Lower East Side were finished in the 1810s, followed by the west–east streets in the 1820s.
Upscale neighborhood
The Commissioners' Plan and resulting street grid was the catalyst for the northward expansion of the city, and for a short period, the portion of the Lower East Side that is now the East Village was one of the wealthiest residential neighborhoods in the city. Bond Street between the Bowery and Broadway, just west of the East Side within present-day NoHo, was considered the most upscale street address in the city by the 1830s, with structures such as the Greek Revival-style Colonnade Row and Federal-style rowhouses. The neighborhood's prestigious nature could be attributed to several factors, including a rise in commerce and population following the Erie Canal's opening in the 1820s.Following the grading of the streets, development of rowhouses came to the East Side and NoHo by the early 1830s. One set of Federal-style rowhouses was built in the 1830s by Thomas E. Davis on 8th Street between Second and Third Avenues. That block was renamed "St. Mark's Place" and is one of the few remaining terrace names in the East Village. In 1833 Davis and Arthur Bronson bought the entire block of 10th Street from Avenue A to Avenue B. The block was located adjacent to Tompkins Square Park, located between 7th and 10th Streets from Avenue A to Avenue B, designated the same year.
Though the park was not in the original Commissioners' Plan of 1811, part of the land from 7th to 10th Streets east of First Avenue had been set aside for a marketplace that was ultimately never built. Rowhouses up to three stories were built on the side streets by such developers as Elisha Peck and Anson Green Phelps; Ephraim H. Wentworth; and Christopher S. Hubbard and Henry H. Casey.
Mansions were also built on the East Side. One notable address was the twelve-house development called "Albion Place", located on Fourth Street between the Bowery and Second Avenue, built for Peck and Phelps in 1832–1833. Second Avenue also had its own concentration of mansions, though most residences on that avenue were row houses built by speculative land owners, including the Isaac T. Hopper House. One New York Evening Post article in 1846 said that Second Avenue was to become one of "the two great avenues for elegant residences" in Manhattan, the other being Fifth Avenue.
Two marble cemeteries were also built on the East Side: the New York City Marble Cemetery, built in 1831 on 2nd Street between First and Second Avenues, and the New York Marble Cemetery, built in 1830 within the backlots of the block to the west. Following the rapid growth of the neighborhood, Manhattan's 17th ward was split from the 11th ward in 1837. The former covered the area from Avenue B to the Bowery, while the latter covered the area from Avenue B to the East River.
Immigrant neighborhood
19th century
By the middle of the 19th century, many of the wealthy had continued to move further northward to the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side. Some wealthy families remained, and one observer noted in the 1880s that these families "look down with disdain upon the parvenus of Fifth avenue". In general, though, the wealthy population of the neighborhood started to decline as many moved northward. Immigrants from modern-day Ireland, Germany, and Austria moved into the rowhouses and manors.The population of Manhattan's 17th wardwhich includes the western part of the East Village and Lower East Sidegrew from 18,000 in 1840 to over 43,000 by 1850 and to 73,000 persons in 1860, becoming the city's most highly populated ward at that time. As a result of the Panic of 1837, the city had experienced less construction in the previous years, and so there was a dearth of units available for immigrants, resulting in the subdivision of many houses in lower Manhattan.
Another solution was brand-new "tenant houses", or tenements, within the East Side. Clusters of these buildings were constructed by the Astor family and Stephen Whitney. The developers rarely involved themselves with the daily operations of the tenements, instead subcontracting landlords to run each building. Numerous tenements were erected, typically with footprints of, before regulatory legislation was passed in the 1860s.
To address concerns about unsafe and unsanitary conditions, a second set of laws was passed in 1879, requiring each room to have windows, resulting in the creation of air shafts between each building. Subsequent tenements built to the law's specifications were referred to as Old Law Tenements. Reform movements, such as the one started by Jacob Riis's 1890 book How the Other Half Lives, continued to attempt to alleviate the problems of the area through settlement houses, such as the Henry Street Settlement, and other welfare and service agencies.
Because most of the new immigrants were German speakers, the East Village and the Lower East Side collectively became known as "Little Germany". The neighborhood had the third largest urban population of Germans outside of Vienna and Berlin. It was America's first foreign language neighborhood; hundreds of political, social, sports and recreational clubs were set up during this period. Numerous churches were built in the neighborhood, of which many are still extant. In addition, Little Germany also had its own library on Second Avenue, now the New York Public Library's Ottendorfer branch. However, the community started to decline after the sinking of the General Slocum on June 15, 1904, in which more than a thousand German-Americans died.
The Germans who moved out of the area were replaced by immigrants of many different nationalities. This included groups of Italians and Eastern European Jews, as well as Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, Romanians, Russians, Slovaks and Ukrainians, each of whom settled in relatively homogeneous enclaves. In How the Other Half Lives Riis wrote: "A map of the city, colored to designate nationalities, would show more stripes than on the skin of a zebra, and more colors than any rainbow."
One of the first groups to populate the former Little Germany were Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, who first settled south of Houston Street before moving northward. The Roman Catholic Poles as well as the Protestant Hungarians would also have a significant impact in the East Side, erecting houses of worship next to each other along 7th Street at the turn of the 20th century. American-born New Yorkers would build other churches and community institutions, including the Olivet Memorial Church at 59 East 2nd Street, the Middle Collegiate Church at 112 Second Avenue, and the Society of the Music School Settlement, now Third Street Music School Settlement, at 53–55 East 3rd Street.
By the 1890s tenements were being designed in the ornate Queen Anne and Romanesque Revival styles. Tenements built in the later part of the decade were built in the Renaissance Revival style. At the time, the area was increasingly being identified as part of the Lower East Side.