|
|
There are four
different place names used to refer
to the area between Houston and 14th
Streets and
Avenue A and the East River: A part of the Lower
East Side, Loisaida, Alphabet City, and a part of
the East Village. This is perhaps the clearest
indicator of past and present battles over the
meaning of neighborhood.
The first name, Lower
East Side, referred to New
York's old working class residential and industrial
area that expanded northward in the nineteenth
century as a tenement district. For the city's upper
classes of the nineteenth century the Lower East
Side was a feared, chaotic and threatening space
that housed the great "unwashed" foreign
masses.
In the midst of waves of immigration, newcomers
from various European destinations carved out
ethnic spaces, such as Little Italy, which later
contracted and became primarily a tourist zone.
Today, using Lower East Side to describe the area
north of Houston Street conveys a commitment to
maintain the district as a working class
neighborhood.
Loisaida
(Spanglish for Lower East Side) also has
cultural and political meanings; it refers to the
Puerto Rican enclave east of Avenue A formed in
the late 1950s and early 1960s. The area's
present minority residents (Puerto Ricans,
Dominicans, other Latinos and blacks) refer to their
neighborhood as Loisaida as do many housing
activists and community organizers and other low
and moderate income residents who weathered the
ravages of abandonment in the 1970s and
redevelopment in the 1980s. Loisaida is
synonymous with community action, hope and
resistance.
Alphabet City
refers to the same area as
Loisaida (Avenues A, B, C and D) and emerged in
the late 1970s and early 1980s in connection to the
arts scene that soon attracted real estate investors
to an abundant supply of devalued tenement
buildings. The somewhat playful name Alphabet
City concealed the area's rampant physical and
social decline and downplayed the area's Latino
identity.
The name, East
Village, which extends beyond
Avenue A west to Fourth Avenue, appeared with
the earlier hippie movement and signified the
opposite to the stodgy, middle class West Village,
was quickly appropriated by real estate brokers
and developers. An "East Village"
disassociated
the identity of the area north of Houston Street
from its working class past and the less developed
streets and avenues to the south. Since realtors,
hippies and other newcomers together referred to
the northern part of the Lower East Side as the
East Village its use was picked up by the local,
national and international media. In the 1970s and
1980s, East Village was synonymous with
downtown underground culture. For many local
activists, the name retains the distinct meaning of
real estate development and displacement. That all
these names continue to be used is strong
testimony to the importance of cultural
representation to neighborhood restructuring and
resistance. In the late 1990s, the symbolic
boundaries of the East Village have dipped below
its Houston Street border, as renovated
apartments, new bars and trendy night clubs
proliferate in the narrow streets of the old Lower
East Side. In fact, those curious about the
development of the East Village in the early 1980s
need only visit south of Houston Street to see a
similar phenomenon transpiring, as urban decay
and development coexist in an awkward and
uneasy form.
The geographical focus
in Selling the Lower
East Side is equivalent to the contemporary
East
Village.
|
