East Village artist Mac McGill shared three more of his illustrations a.k.a. “illos,” as their creators call them, with The Village Sun: “Woke,” “New Year’s” and “LES 1980s.” He uses a Rapidograph No. technical pen to create them. McGill was a squatter in the East Village, though he and his allies will allows know it as the Lower East Side. After all, “East Village” was a marketing term originally cooked up by real-estate types to piggyback off the popularity of Greenwich Village.
![](https://thevillagesun.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mac-mcgill-new-years.jpg)
![](https://thevillagesun.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mac-megill-LES-1980s.jpg)
![](https://thevillagesun.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mac-megill-woke.jpg)
Actually, East Village was in use to describe the neighborhood around Tompkins Square Park and the lettered avenues for many years before the real estate boom. Find a copy of “Once There Was a Village” by the late Yuri Kapralov and read it for more on this.