North: The Alamo Tilted black cube is a sculpture by Tony Rosenthal; he's reportedly amused that spinning the cube on its pivot has become an East Village tradition, so give it a whirl. The statue of Rep. Samuel Cox now in Tompkins Square Park was originally here. This area was once a crossroads of Indian trails, and it's become a gathering place for annual anti-Columbus protests. Oldest steel-framed building in United States, using Cooper's railroad rails. Cooper Union is scheduled to replace the present less-than-inspiring structure with a high-rise, despite some community opposition.
What am I missing on Astor Place? Write to Jim Naureckas and tell him about it. Sources for the Songlines. In , a Newsweek writer noted that those looking for the East Village should "head east from Greenwich Village, and when it starts to look squalid, around the Bowery and Third Avenue, you know you're there.
As Ronald Sukenick wrote in his neighborhood memoir Down and In , the West Village "is removed from Uptown by long subway rides, [but] the East Village is twice removed It was also in that the term "hippie" came into common use to replace Bohemian or Beatnik to describe the new generation of rebellious youth.
Within a year, St. Marks Place had become the magnet for the East Coast counter-culture. For years, the old Arlington Hall having been expanded one more building to the east had been owned by a Polish social club; known as the Dom, it became a popular hangout for the Beats and then a nightclub. The space then morphed into the Electric Circus, where patrons were invited to "play games, dress as they like, dance, sit, think, tune in and turn on.
By , St. Marks, the tourists snapping pictures of every long-haired, bead-wearing hippie they could. Fed up with this, artist Joey Skaggs decided to turn the tables, and on September 22, , he hired a Greyhound bus and a tour guide and took 60 hippies on a guided tour of residential Queens so that they could laugh and point and take photos of the "squares" mowing their lawns and washing their cars.
But St. Marks Place as a hippie enclave was actually a great contrast to the rest of the neighborhood, where no tour bus would go—an area still dominated by immigrants, including Ukrainians who had arrived during World War II and Puerto Ricans who'd settled in the area in the s. Because St. Marks dead-ends into Tompkins Square, the park became a de facto extension of the street, causing friction between the hippies and the larger immigrant population.
On Memorial Day , complaints from area residents about the noise from the Hare Krishnas and the bongo players brought the police, who arrested 38 people. The charges were later dropped, the judge noting that he could not deny " equal protection to the unwashed, unshod, unkempt, and uninhibited.
A few days later, on June 1, a parade of hippies with police escort marched down St. Marks to the park to present a "key to the East Village" to the Grateful Dead accepted by Pigpen who were making their New York debut at the park's bandshell that afternoon.
But tensions soon rose again, with the Puerto Ricans wondering why only white bands were represented and not Latino music. Abbie Hoffman stepped in to propose that the parks department help bring more ethnic music to the park. The economic downturn of the s decimated real estate in much of the East Village—leading to the sort of squats later popularized and sanitized by the musical Rent —and the neighborhood did little to shake its "squalid" reputation.
As early as , after a horrific murder on East First Street, the Times described the area as a "nether world" of "violence and crime…as alien to most New Yorkers as the dark side of the moon.
Yet St. Marks Place, buffered by its commercial real estate, continued to remain distinct from the rest of the neighborhood even the rundown tenements at No. In part, this was because of its ability to keep up with the times. In , Manic Panic , the country's first punk boutique, opened at No. The former Russian baths at No. Marks Bath, purportedly the world's largest gay bathhouse when the Department of Health shut it down in the midst of the AIDS crisis in In , Crunch Fitness opened in a studio at 37 St.
The sculpture can be spun on its vertical axis by one person with some effort, and two or more people without trouble. The members of the organization were careful with the prank, as they didn't want to be destructive. The cube stayed up for about 24 hours before NYC maintenance removed the painted cardboard panels from the sculpture. It was restored in December, , and is still able to spin. Historic Places. The Cooper Station Post Office is just two blocks north.
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