The
1960s Counterculture and the Invention of the "East
Village"
At the close of the
1950s, housing conditions and the class, ethnic, and
racial makeup of residents on the Lower East Side
stood in stark contrast to the homogeneous
residential suburban hamlets that had transformed the
outlying regions of northern New Jersey, New York
City and Connecticut. Across the northeast United
States, growth in suburban development showed little
indication of saturation. The inner cities, meanwhile,
continued to lose their middle-class populations and
poverty levels among remaining residents (both old
and new) worsened.
On the Lower East Side,
first and second generation eastern Europeans made do
with the limitations of tenement living while holding
on to their ethnic restaurants, bakeries, butcher
shops, churches and bookstores. Farther east, the
everyday experiences of Puerto Rican families was a
mix of coping with poorly maintained and dilapidated
tenements and dwindling employment opportunities and
building both organized community organizations and
informal cultural attachments to their adopted homes.
Many of the social problems encountered in the 1950s,
including limited employment opportunities, declines
in community infrastructure (such as schools,
playgrounds and parks) and juvenile delinquency,
continued to plague the Lower East Side in the early
1960s.
By 1965, the popular
media referred to the Lower East Side streets and
avenues above Houston Street as the East Village.
East Village applied to the area’s hippie
community and not to the older white ethnic and
Puerto Rican residents. By 1966 a rite of passage for
many neophyte hippies was a pilgrimage either to
Haight-Ashbury on the west coast or to the East
Village. The streets and avenues north of Houston
Street attracted the burgeoning countercultures that
offered a variety of social, political and cultural
challenges to mainstream society. The
characterization of the Lower East Side as different,
authentic, anti-suburban and uncorrupted held appeal
to a number of youth movements, together loosely
identified as the hippie movement.
In the East Village,
St. Mark’s Place was the center of hippie
culture. Along the sidewalks, hippies performed,
recited poems, chanted or engaged in "be-ins"
and "be-outs." A "be-in" or
"be-out" combined elements of performance,
protest, entertainment and audience participation.
"Happenings" actively included the audience
in a performance piece. The Film Makers’
Cinematheque on Lafayette Street was often the site
of happenings presented by the artists Claes
Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg among others.
Active performance pieces were also included with a
showing of experimental film. The Grateful Dead,
Santana and The Who were among the many musical acts
who performed at The Filmore East on Second Avenue.
| Andy
Warhol transformed the Polish meeting club,
the Dom, on St. Mark’s Place into an
experimental club. The Dom's "house band"
was the Velvet Underground (with Nico).
Warhol also mounted his "total
environment" show, The Exploding
Plastic Inevitable. |
|
| Another
popular local band was the Fugs. The Fugs
appeared frequently at the Astor Place
Playhouse. |
 Astor Place: Gateway to
the East Village.
|
Along St. Mark's Place,
rock poster and bead shops, second-hand clothing
stores, drug emporia and other commercial spaces
catered to the hippie consumer and the growing
numbers of curious tourists. The Something and
Psychedelicatessen were two popular eateries.
Experimental theater was also popular in the East
Village. Theater troupes leased church basements and
coffee houses nestled in old tenements. Theater
Genesis was founded in the church community space at
St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie at Second Avenue and
10th Street. Theater 62 on East 4th
Street and the Far East on East 2nd Street
survived briefly on audience donations. The most
famous of avant-garde theaters, Cafe La Mama E.T.C. (Experimental
Theater Club), opened at 321 East 9th
Street (it has since relocated to East 4th
Street).
For many white, middle
class adolescents and young adults, the hippie
alternative to the suburban lifestyle was alluring.
The pervasiveness of second-hand familiarity with
hippie culture outside the east and west coast
bohemian enclaves was driven by extensive and
sometimes favorable media coverage in the mid-1960s.
Articles in Newsweek, Esquire, Look and
Life magazines portrayed the hippies as
"mystical" and "ethereal" and
presented auspicious accounts of the East Village
community. As the symbols and images associated with
the hippie movement permeated middle-class suburban
hamlets, young adults sought out the means of
expressing their growing interest in the
counterculture. The East Village (and Haight-Ashbury)
loomed as places to participate in and fully
experience the hippie counterculture. Suburban
devotees made pilgrimages to the site
of cultural expression and in 1966-67, the East
Village was overwhelmed by those seeking to live out
some notion of a "hippie lifestyle."
Hippie culture
coexisted and often participated in the artistic
endeavors of the black artists and intellectuals who
also formed communities on the Lower East Side —
"a kind of Harlem Renaissance downtown"
— in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Umbra
Workshop, which included authors Askia Muhammad Toure,
Ishmael Reed, and many others, proved an important
vehicle for black writers. Black musicians Archie
Shepp and Marion Brown were central figures in the
local music scene. St. Mark’s Place and Third
Avenue was the crossroads of the hippie phenomenon
from which neighborhood renewal spread to adjacent
blocks of the tenements and storefronts. At the peak
of "hip affluence," the resurgence of the
property market made inroads into the eastern
district’s primarily Latino neighborhood east of
Avenue A. But the boom was short-lived.
Links (click to follow)
Click here for a definition of "East
Village."
Click here for a homepage of the East
Village.
Click here to read about historical hippie
happenings.
What is a hippie? Here are
several definitions.
Are YOU a neo-hippie?
Click
here to go to Hippy Land Hippie Magazine.
Visit Haight-Ashbury.com
Click here for a "hippie webring".
Links on Andy Warhol.
Here is an
article on the culture of the sixties.
Here is a resource for hippie links.
BANDS
Click here for a
history of The Velvet Underground’s performances
(some in the East Village.)
Click here for a
history of The Velvet Underground’s films.
Click here for
links related to The Grateful Dead.
Click here for
links related to The Who.
Click here for
an interview with the former leader of The Fugs.
More history on The Fugs here.
 |
____________________________________
The book upon which this
web site is based,
Selling
the Lower East Side,
is available
directly through 
or order through 
Site design © 2000:
Kurt
Reymers and Dan
Webb.
(University at Buffalo, Department of
Sociology)
|
