Alphabet City, Manhattan
Alphabet City is a neighborhood located within the East Village in the New York City borough of Manhattan. Its name comes from Avenues A, B, C, and D, the only avenues in Manhattan to have single-letter names. It is bounded by Houston Street to the south and 14th Street to the north, and extends roughly from Avenue A to the East River. Some famous landmarks include Tompkins Square Park, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and the Charlie Parker Residence.
The neighborhood has a long history, serving as a cultural center and ethnic enclave for Manhattan's German, Polish, Hispanic, and immigrants of Jewish descent. However, there is much dispute over the borders of the Lower East Side, Alphabet City, and East Village. Historically, Manhattan's Lower East Side was bounded by 14th Street at the northern end, on the east by the East River and on the west by First Avenue; today, that same area is sometimes referred to as Alphabet City, with Houston Street as the southern boundary. The area's German presence in the early 20th century, in decline, virtually ended after the General Slocum disaster in 1904.
Alphabet City is part of Manhattan Community District 3 and its primary ZIP Code is 10009. It is patrolled by the 9th Precinct of the New York City Police Department.
Etymology
The Commissioners' Plan of 1811, which laid out the grid scheme of Manhattan above Houston Street, designated 16 north–south "avenues". Twelve numbered avenues were to run continuously to Harlem, while four lettered ones—A, B, C and D—appeared intermittently wherever the island widened east of First Avenue. The plan called for stretches of Avenue A and Avenue B north of midtown, all of which have been renamed. In 1943, Avenue A went as far north as 25th Street, Avenue B ended at 21st Street, and Avenue C reached 18th Street. Stuyvesant Town, a post–World War II private residential development, blotted out the rest of A and B above 14th Street. What remained of 1811's lettered avenues came to be called, by some, Alphabet City.There is disagreement about the earliest uses of the name. It is often characterized as a marketing invention of realtors and other gentrifiers who arrived in the 1980s. However, sociologist Christopher Mele connects the term to the arts scene of the late 1970s which in turn attracted real estate investors. As such, argues Mele, Alphabet City and its many variants—Alphaville, Alphabetland, etc.—were "playful" but also "concealed the area's rampant physical and social decline and downplayed the area’s Latino identity." Pete Hamill, a longtime New York City journalist, cites darker origins. NYPD officers, he claims, referred to the most degraded areas east of Avenue B as Alphabet City in the 1950s.
Whatever its origins, the name began to appear in print around 1980 with all three associations—crime, art, and gentrification. A December 1980 article in the Daily News reported on the eastward flow of gentrification:
The Official Preppy Handbook, published in October 1980, caricatured a subgroup of preppies as "connoisseurs of punk... who spend their weekends in alphabet city on the Lower East Side." Similarly, a November 1984 article in The New York Times reported "Younger artists... are moving downtown to an area variously referred to as Alphabetland, Alphabetville, or Alphabet City."
The term appeared in March 1983 in the New York Daily News regarding anti-drug raids in the area. It also appeared in The New York Times in an April 1984 editorial by Mayor Ed Koch justifying recent police operations:
In common, Mele notes, the early uses shared the "mystique of 'living on the edge'." As early as 1989, however, a Newsday article suggested the mood, even among newcomers, had changed:
Several local nickname sets associated with the ABCD denotation have included Adventurous, Brave, Crazy and Dead and, more recently by writer George Pendle, "Affluent, Bourgeois, Comfortable, Decent".
History
Before urbanization
Prior to development, most of present-day Alphabet City was a salt marsh, regularly flooded by the tides of the East River. Marshes played a critical role in the food web and protected the coast. The Lenape Native Americans who inhabited Manhattan before European contact presided over similar ecosystems from New York Bay to Delaware Bay. They tended to settle in forest clearings. In summer, however, they foraged shellfish, gathered cordgrass for weaving, and otherwise exploited the wetlands.Dutch settlers brought a different model of land ownership and use. In 1625, representatives of the Dutch West India Company set their sights on lower Manhattan, with plans for a fortified town at its tip served by farms above. In 1626, they "purchased" the island from a local Lenape group and began parceling the land into boweries. The northern half of the Alphabet City area was part of Bowery Number 2. The southwest quarter was part of Bowery Number 3. Both belonged initially to the company but were soon sold to individuals. By 1663, a year before surrendering the colony to England, Director General Peter Stuyvesant had acquired the relevant part of Number 2 and much of Number 3 from other settlers. The company divided the southeast quarter of Alphabet City into small lots associated with larger parcels further away from the shore. In this way, upland farmers gained access to the unique tidal ecosystem—"salt meadow" as they called it—and with it, "salt hay," a cordgrass species valued as fodder. In his influential Description of New Netherland, Adriaen van der Donck informed his fellow Dutchmen:
The Dutch, then, were singularly attuned to the potential for land reclamation. During the city's first two centuries, however, large-scale landfill was limited to the more commercial southern end of the island, particularly wharfs at the mouth of the East River. Stuyvesant and his heirs, with the help of slave labor, continued to occupy their farm as a country estate, cultivating it lightly and making few changes to the land.
Development of the avenues
After the Revolutionary War, with a surge in population and trade, the city was poised to grow northward. Around 1789, Peter Stuyvesant, great-grandson of the Director General by that name, came up with a plan for the area, mapping out streets to build and lots to sell. In doing so, he was following the precedent of landowners to the south. However, by this time, the city was laying out roads of its own and wanted to connect the whole. The first proposal for a unified street system was the Mangin–Goerck Plan. Presented in 1799, it extended Stuyvesant's grid into the cove above Alphabet City, straightening the shoreline such that Alphabet City and the Lower East Side were no longer an isolated bulge. When this plan succumbed to political squabbles and landowner demands, the city appealed to the state to dictate a design. The result was the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, setting out the street grid of Manhattan above Houston Street."In general," the commissioners resolved, everything "should be rectangular." However, the new roads were rotated relative to the existing ones just below Alphabet City. Moreover, the commissioners could do little to straighten the shoreline. They were limited by charter to reclaiming 400 feet beyond the low-water mark, much less than the Mangin-Goerck plan entailed. First Avenue reflected this limit. It was drawn parallel to Fifth Avenue as far east as possible while not straying too far into the water. Irregular bits of land protruded beyond First Avenue and, for these cases, the commissioners turned to lettered avenues. Avenues A and B appeared around Alphabet City, popped up again above midtown, and once more in Harlem. Avenues C and D existed only in Alphabet City. Thus the neighborhood was misaligned with the old grid and relatively disconnected to the new one.
On the other hand, Alphabet City retained its long, arcing bank along the East River, just north of the ever-growing ports and shipyards that animated the city. The commissioners placed the avenues on the east side of the island closer together in anticipation of denser development there. For Alphabet City proper, they envisioned a wholesale food market supplying the entire city. It would extend from 7th to 10th Street and from First Avenue to the river, with a canal up the middle. The commissioners wrote: "The place selected for this purpose is a salt marsh, and from that circumstance, of inferior price, though in regard to its destination, of greater value than other soil."
Despite having sought a binding plan, the city requested many modifications from the state during execution, generally along lines demanded by property interests. Given the marshy environs, Alphabet City landowners, mostly Stuyvesants, argued for an extra measure of deference and the city concurred:
To this end, the proposed market place, like most of the public spaces in the plan, was returned to private hands. It was reduced to a sliver in 1815, then scrapped altogether in 1824. The city argued that the land was too remote to serve its intended purpose at the time and that holding onto it would deter development. Urban historian Edward Spann lamented, "What was perhaps the most far-sighted feature of the Plan was the first to be completely eliminated."
In the same act that abolished the market place, the state accommodated a landowner petition to narrow just the lettered avenues. From the standard avenue width of, Avenue A was reduced to, Avenues B, C and D to, the width of most cross-streets. "Incapable of use as thoroughfares to and from the City," wrote the city council, "they cannot be considered as avenues in the proper Sense of the term." Instead, they should "correspond as far as possible with the Old Streets of which they will form the Continuation & be called by the Same names & be regulated by the Corporation as Streets."
Weighing heavily in these decisions was the marsh itself and the water that drained—or failed to drain—through it. The debate about grading and draining Alphabet City's streets went round and round for over a decade, even as filling proceeded. The standard design called for the land to slope down to the river uniformly throughout the watershed, which extended as far inland as Bowery. However, landowners, who would be assessed the cost of road construction, objected to the expense of so much landfill. In 1823, a newly created committee, with latitude to amend the 1811 plan, proposed to save money with a network of closed sewers, but these suffered a bad reputation from repeated clogging in older parts of the city. Another proposal, from a new committee, echoed the former market place design, calling for open, ornamented canals on 6th, 9th and 14th Streets. In 1832, as no amount of fill seemed to stem periodic flooding, the city resolved on a simpler sewer system. In this design, the land would slope down to Avenue C from both east and west like a trough, and flow through a sewer to the river at 14th Street. With this decided, roads and buildings went forward, though sewer construction itself would wait for decades. Archaeological excavations along Avenue C at 8th Street show that the site was incrementally raised 10–12 feet between 1820 and 1840, occupied from the 1840s, and only drained by the proposed sewer line in 1867.