Beatniks
of the 1950s
Although the postwar
New York avant garde -- the beatniks or beats -- was
centered in the West Village, the Lower East Side
emerged as an alternative or, for some, a corrective
to the more popular west side beat scene. As the West
Village "scene" attracted tourists, many
beats looked eastward. Many beats were attracted to
the Lower East Side’s cheaper rents, ethnic
restaurants and the unpretentious ways. By the mid
1950s, painters, writers, musicians and curious
spectators colonized the ethnic restaurants, coffee
shops, saloons and cheap "cold water"
tenements.
Links (click to follow)
Click here for a Beat
Generation resource page.
Click here for Beat Generation
links.
More Beat Generation links…..
Click here for a narrative of
the Beat lifestyle.
Click to read about Beat poet
Allen Ginsburg.
The
Tenth Street Art Movement
The Lower East Side
hosted a loosely connected art colony on East 10th
Street that formed as part of the avant gardist New
York School. Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline showed
their work in studio lofts and storefronts along East
10th Street near 4th Avenue
— thus the label, "Tenth Street Movement."
A 1956 exhibition entitled "Painters and
Sculptors on Tenth Street" featured the works of
25 artists who lived on the street. Artists enjoyed
the east side atmosphere of heightened diversity,
social chaos and disorder. The Five Spot, a bar on
Cooper Square, at the western fringe of the Lower
East Side, began to attract a "subterranean"
crowd in the mid 1950s. The artists, de Kooning and
Larry Rivers, frequented the bar as did the beat
writers Jack Kerouac and Frank O’Hara and jazz
bassist Charles Mingus and saxophonist Sonny Rollins.
Franz Kline, along with several other Abstract
Expressionists, were habitues of the Colony, a bar on
the corner of E. 10th Street and Fourth Avenue.
Links (click to follow)
New York School
Painters:
Jackson Pollock
New York School
Poets:
John Ashbery
Frank O'Hara
Kenneth Koch
Click here to read about the
Tenth Street Studio today.
Click here for a short Jack
Kerouac biography.
A taste of the Lower East Side???
