Trying to save the soul of the East Village — or at least what’s left of it

BY LINDA JUSTICE | The East Village has endured waves and cycles. But will it survive this time? Most say not!

I offer this article because I want us as a neighborhood and city to become truly aware of what we are losing, to bring it to full consciousness so we can make the best decisions and to make sure we will be satisfied with the outcome.

One peculiarity of New York is how each block has its own unique vibe.

In “St. Marks Is Dead,” Ada Calhoun wrote: “This street is for the wanderer, the undecided, the lonely, and the promiscuous.”

Yes, in general the whole East Village can be considered the home of riffraff, legendary artists, radicals and dissidents. But I would like to share another story, another beginning often missed. I would like to take it up a notch.

At 27, I found myself moving to St. Mark’s to attend the School of Visual Arts. I knew nothing about New York. And I can only speak from my own viewpoint, that on St. Mark’s Place between Second and Third Avenues, regardless of the riffraff, were people who had strength and determination to suffer under the weight of staggering rents, crime and corruption, to follow their dreams, and care for their families, or study.

Many young people living between Second and Third attended New York University, The Cooper Union or S.V.A., while others created businesses. My close friend Sandra followed in her mother’s footsteps by opening a homey Italian restaurant featuring her own Northern Italian recipes. She worked her fingers to the bone to pay rent. Her place became a center for friendly gatherings on an otherwise crazy, dystopian block. Previously, she had helped design and cooked the menu for Khyber Pass restaurant. Those folks crossed the Khyber Pass, ending up on St. Mark’s, where they created their superb Middle Eastern cuisine.

And St. Mark’s Bookshop. One partner in the bookshop told me, as I sat next to him at the counter inside B&H Dairy, that it was his only meal for the day, homemade soup with challah bread, that kept him alive so he could help build that store. Another person wrote that when St. Mark’s Bookshop closed, for her, St. Mark’s Place ended. It was that vital to the community — a wellspring of contemporary thinking.

Heads and Tails, Hair and numerous other hair salons, packed on weekends, offered haircuts as good as any Uptown salon but at affordable prices.

These venues were well thought-out, offering warmth and cohesion, as did many other shops too numerous to mention here. They were contributors to the legendary music and dance scene.

The summer I moved in, most of the stores were boarded up. At La Fregata cafe (Ada Calhoun lived next door), the house specialty was cafe au lait served in oversized ceramic U.S. Navy bowls, “with lids.” The cafe became a gathering spot for Peruvian artists, American artists, students, poets and theater groups.

And at 9 p.m. or so, if La Fregata was full, the owner, Ed, would shut the doors and offer free coffee on the house and we’d all hang out until the wee hours of the morning. Of course, in those days, you could smoke cigarettes inside.

So what I wish to say is that St. Mark’s is not dead. It is being systematically killed off.

What determines a neighborhood? What confluence of ideas? What group soul arrives at the same time to usher in something new — and who decides?

Kurt Vonnegut, in “Cat’s Cradle,” called it a “karass.”

A karass is the Bokononist term for a group of people brought together to do God’s work — though the purpose of that work is not something of which they can ever be fully aware.

I was so lucky to be a fly on the wall of many creative ventures. Gosh, when I arrived, the Tibetans were here, the Hare Krishnas, the Orthodox Christians, shamans. Weiser’s Bookstore — the oldest occult bookstore in the nation — was full every weekend with young people sprawled all over the floor reading mystical texts. One gulp and I was in.

The Human Potential Movement was here: Werner Erhard’s EST, Robert Fritz’s DMA, Gavin Barnes’s Direct Centering, Arica by Ichaszo. The Open Center held its first meeting at Cooper Union. The Sufis were here, the whirling dervishes — offering a great influx of spiritual energy into the city.

People were reading Carlos Castaneda and “Rolling Thunder.” They were attending Sun Bear’s Rainbow gatherings. The city was alive. Amid all this chaos, people were trying to wake up.

It seems my every wish was granted. I studied Byzantine iconography in the basement of an Orthodox church, led by Russian masters who needed translation. In our little cubbyhole, we mixed paints in the ancient alchemical tradition. Although not Orthodox, I attended an opening ceremony led by a beloved French bishop across from my apartment, and got to attend a small gathering with him afterward. He walked in, poured himself a whiskey and raised it to the heavens: “Does anyone here really believe in God!” he exclaimed. My kind of priest: One who is always questioning. And I was able to see films at Theatre 80.

I was here alone, without family — and passing Theatre 80 every day gave some kind of assurance of cultural stability. There were folks we had all grown up with, enshrined in photographs and memorabilia — and handprints in cement out front. The theater was created by Howard Otway — with his young son Lorcan helping him dig out the venue’s floor by hand to deepen it.

When I wanted to work in the theater, I was able to volunteer in the East Village with Mabou Mines at the Public Theater and with Jun Maeda at La MaMa. I was horrible at everything, finding it hard and difficult. But I jumped in anyway just to be around great minds and creative thinking.

This was all available. So, I say to anyone who feels that most came here to take drugs: There were others who came here as seekers, coming from the doldrums of suburban life, where the arts were something one would only see in a Sunday magazine.

Here, I would like to take a step back to 1859 and the opening of The Cooper Union and dedicate this article to Peter Cooper and his visionary quote: “I look to see the day when the teachers of Christianity…will be reconciled to the government of love, the only government that can ever bring the kingdom of heaven into the hearts of mankind either here or hereafter.”

Peter Cooper believed that education should be free. He believed in progressive thinking. He believed in inclusivity. He believed in radical ideas. He built the Great Hall, inviting Abraham Lincoln to lecture. I saw Kurt Vonnegut lecture there in 1984.

But students still needed places to live. I was trying to find out how the East Village came into being — how the particular notion of it being a cash-poor neighborhood came to be.

I want to say this loud and clear: The East Village did not “just happen.” It was created! Peter Cooper set in motion what the East Village would become. Everything here was created by people who lived here, moved here, made it their home. The commercial places that opened did so because they saw “need” not “greed.”

Some, like Ed of La Fregata, were visionaries. He went on to create the Cloister Cafe on E. Ninth Street. With the help of his wife, Eva, and a few friends, they restored the premises by hand back to the era of Peter Stuyvesant. I remember helping him arduously dig away the asphalt to expose the original cobblestones. (His fingers were bloody and raw.) And everyone was so excited to help him create his vision.

And then there’s Kiehl’s Pharmacy. It began as an apothecary in 1851. More than 100 years later, in 1961, Aaron Morse took it over. Morse had let his fluffy, jet-black hair grow out and had perfect white skin. One day I walked in and, just like the queen in “Snow White,” he was looking into a cosmetics mirror, examining his red lipstick. They made their own and he told me he tested each color himself. There were no ornamental displays in the store. Amid its worn wooden floors, shelves and rustic cabinetry were displayed merchandise, plus “a museum’s worth of Harley Davidsons,” his private collection. And the adjoining room was turned into a hangar with stunt planes — his own! He was a former fighter pilot. This was the kind of person who made up the East Village, with ingenuity, creativity, passion.

The East Village forced its way into being a community where anyone could come, get a part-time job washing dishes, and rent a room to pursue his or her interests.

The East Village, for all of its problems, has always been a unique, thriving, creative community of diverse streets, cultures and religions, and eateries offering homemade food, all coexisting and being totally creative — this is what was killed.

People refer to buildings — like Theatre 80 St. Mark’s — being bought and sold. But they are not just “buildings.” They are what make the community thrive, give it uniqueness, give people who reside here pride and a sense of purpose and belonging.

We confronted cycles of city corruption, violence, theft. There were murders. Crime turned into blood sport, like the wilding gangs who passed through one afternoon, chasing a small, young teenager out into the middle of traffic at Astor Place. Nobody could stop them. A new cycle had begun, a vicious cycle of violence. The cycle of lightheartedness ended, took a nosedive.

In 1989, a brutal killing followed on the heels of the Binibon restaurant murder, which had seen writer Norman Mailer’s protégé Jack Abbott slay a waiter. At Sandra’s restaurant, her upstairs neighbor, Milan, whom I had had dinner with the previous week, took in a homeless man. They got into a fight over politics and the man shot and dismembered Milan. The victim, an immigrant and a veteran, was never given a soldier’s burial, but was interred in Potter’s Field.

Yet, somehow we thrived. We survived 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy. But what is happening now is not only destroying buildings, but any unique neighborhood spirit that had been created and fostered.

“After a night of inebriation in the E.V., I stopped at a pizza place…”

My friend, a shop owner, informed me that New York will be driven by real estate. He shrugged, sitting at the counter smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. I also shrugged. So now we will foster in folks who stand around with hands in their pockets eating ice cream, as we walk through the broken glass of smashed beer bottles from the previous night, the shards cutting into our dogs’ feet, and we will wonder what happened, and we won’t know what to do about it.

It takes a very long time to create a neighborhood. This one began a new cycle around 1977 with the influx of young people from N.Y.U., Cooper Union and School of Visual Arts, mixing with the folks who came after WWII. Boarded-up shops were opened to allow in new creativity. For a while, businesses and art flourished side by side, but for only a very short while.

And who knows what brings in a new cycle. Is it a matter of what the human spirit can endure and how much it can take, before it becomes a world of restless disembodied zombies?

So we’ve earned our right to remain here, thriving and creating, saving what is left and reinvigorating where possible and imagining a future.

When I first moved here in 1977, in front of my building someone had thoughtfully planted a honeysuckle bush. Now, it’s gone! I wonder how many of our children know the scent of honeysuckle.

And who knew that one’s personal spiritual cycle could begin in such a city as New York, and in such a neighborhood as the East Village, where all traditions intersect — one’s inner canvas bursting open and one’s deepest aspirations realized in this crazy, crazy neighborhood.

Justice is an artist and writer living in the East Village.