East
Village as Brand Name
In contemporary
consumer culture, neighborhood identity exists as a
vehicle for advertising goods, products, and
lifestyles. What constitutes the East Village "brand"
is a stylized and de-politicized subversion borrowed
from past and present images, symbols and rhetorics
of protest, resistance and experimentation.
Squatter protests in
the late 1980s and early 1990s contributed to the
area’s radical reputation. While state political
and legal repression of squatters intensified, the
media increasingly focused attention upon the
squatters’ cultural expressions -- the familiar
symbols, images and icons of protest —downplaying
(largely by ignoring) their politics. To the dismay
of the squatters (who eventually mounted a protest
outside the theater), the Broadway show Rent
set the otherwise highly politicized struggle between
capitalists and community to melody and theatrical
dance.
The media celebration
of gay and drag subcultures has also implicated the
East Village as a culturally radical site. Within the
New York gay scene of the 1980s and early 1990s, non-conformity
associated with the East Village served as cultural
antipode to the West Village’s reputation as
post-Stonewall, white, middle-class and accommodating
to the mainstream "straight" world. A
younger, more radical, inclusive and vocal queer
culture was centered in East Village bars, clubs,
coffee shops and other meeting spaces. Wigstock, a
yearly festival held at the close of summer in
Tompkins Square Park, promoted the fabrication of an
East Village gay identity.
These shifts in the
representation of the East Village from marginal to
central have been increasingly commodified and
packaged as subversive or alternative culture. The
area’s dominant population of working class and
impoverished families, minorities, informal workers,
drug dealers, prostitutes, and the homeless function
as a cast of background players in an abstracted
environment themed around carefully managed
representations of dysfunction and difference.
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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)
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