The term East Village first appeared in the early 1960s when artists from Greenwich Village started moving east to escape the rising cost of rent. This move to the Lower East Side was partly tied to the destruction of the Third Avenue El in 1956 that had served as a physical and social divide between the two neighborhoods. As the artist community spread east, real estate brokers followed closely behind hoping to cash in on the areas’ growing connection to the bohemian scene. Relators began referring to the neighborhood as “East of the Village” or the “Village East” and hippies began flocking to the area. Indeed, the first mention of the East Village in The New York Times came on Feb 7, 1960, and even at this early stage the article remarked upon real estate interests in the neighborhood.
At the same time East Village had begun experiencing other serious demographic changes. The older immigrant community largely of Eastern European descent was being replaced by the city’s rapidly growing Puerto Rican population. Between 1940 and 1970 the city’s Puerto Rican population exploded, growing from a minority of about 100,000 to over a million. Many of the new immigrants settled in the Lower East Side, and by the time the hippies arrived there was a large Puerto Rican presence in the neighborhood.
Through the influence of hippies, artists, and real estate agents the name East Village had become common among New Yorkers by the late 1960s. In a June 5, 1967 article titled “The 2 Worlds of the East Village” the Times pointed to the general acceptance of the term noting that the area had already “come to be known” as the East Village, but it also hinted that some New Yorkers were uneasy with the changes in the neighborhood. Referencing clash between city police and about 200 hippies, the article claimed that there was a large divide between the officers and residents of the “seething streets”. The author, which tellingly only interviewed police officers, declared that cops in their “trim, blue uniforms and highly polished shoes find it difficult to understand the world of the unkempt, long haired hippies, the Puerto Ricans with their strange language and customs, and the Negroes.” Indeed, for this author and the officers he interviewed, the residents of the East Village did not conform to what he called “middle-class society and values”. One of the officers described hippies saying, “You feel like vomiting,” while another complained of Puerto Ricans that they “like to congregate on the streets,” and “play their guitars at all hours of the night”. These descriptions did not represent everyone’s view of the East Village, but for the author and his clean-cut cops, the neighborhood seemed like an unfriendly place.
Despite the critics, the East Village continued to grow in popularity and became a large draw for tourists in the 60s and 70s. One young hippie described the appeal of the neighborhood the best simply stating, “You go where the action is.”
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Heather, I really enjoyed your post. I always find it interesting how places, especially communities, get their names. The changing demographics of the neighborhood was also interesting, especially the clashes between the police, the Puerto Rican immigrants, and the hippies and how the were portrayed in the newspaper showing the different attitudes towards the growing East Village.
I had heard about this name change previously, but I still wonder what created the distinct delineation between the “village” and LES. Logically, I feel like the boundaries of the Village should run east west from the Hudson to the East River. Today I consider the Lower East side to be south of Houston, mostly around Chinatown and the Williamsburg bridge. Perhaps we’d have to go back to the early 19th century to figure what made the boundaries of Greenwich Village stop so arbitrarily around 3rd Ave, or how old even that delineation is.
I was surprised to learn that the connection between Greenwich Village and the East Village began so recently too. With the current geography of the city it does seem intuitive that the Village would flow west to east, but I as far as I can see before the ’60s the Third Ave. El served as a bigger dividing line between neighborhoods than Houston. I think the divide was also more psychological than it physical.
As an avid fan of mass transit in NYC, I think one of the most fascinating aspects of your post is the major impact the Third Avenue El had on shaping people’s attitudes about the area in which they lived. In many ways that idea still comes into play today when people reference their section of a particular neighborhood by the subway line that stops nearest to them (this is sometimes the case in Washington Heights where there is a divide in the neighborhood between the 1 and the A trains). It’s amazing that by simply removing the El, the perception of the whole “East Village” changed.
I also really appreciated your highlighting the removal of the Third Ave El. In reality, this didn’t just change people’s perception of the area, it changed the landscape itself and what was really a physical demarkation of class and economic status. This is such a great example of an fairly common situation that usually happens in the reverse. Usually, a physical barrier is created in an urban environment causing one side to thrive and the other to wither and die.
In the 1940s, the building of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) cut the neighborhood of Red Hook in half, physically isolating and economically crippling the western part, which is surrounded on three sides by water. Not long after, the eastern half, no longer wishing to be associated with their crime ridden and impoverished neighbors, actively changed their area’s name to Carroll Gardens.
It’s really refreshing to see a case in which this kind of interaction between physical and socioeconomic landscape helps an area, rather than doing it harm.