East Village Oral History
Between 2012 and 2017, photographer James Maher stopped more than 200 people on the sidewalks of Manhattan’s East Village and asked them about their lives and their neighborhood. Together, their interviews form an oral history of the East Village at the moment of a tremendous transition, building a mosaic of the vanishing, once dangerous and cheap, fiercely creative New York that residents remember from the 1960s through today, from the burned-out 1970s and the crack-and-AIDS 1980s to the squats of the 1990s and the gentrified present. Originally published as the weekly Out & About column on EV Grieve and guided by its author, John Elsasser.
- What — an oral history of New York’s East Village, 200+ interviews
- When recorded — 2012–2017 (weekly, ~5½ years)
- Eras covered — 1960s–2010s
- By — James Maher, NYC documentary photographer
- Originally — the Out & About in the East Village column on EV Grieve
What this actually is…
For five and a half years, almost every week, James Maher walked out his door with a camera and stopped a stranger on an East Village sidewalk — outside a bodega, in Tompkins Square Park, behind a shop counter — and asked them to talk about their life and their neighborhood. The result is much more than a photo project with captions. It is an oral history celebrating a special New York neighborhood whose spirit has long encompassed the spirit of the city as a whole: more than 200 people, from a 12-year-old born on the Lower East Side to a 79-year-old who’d lived in the same building for 50 years, from a Ramones-cover photographer to a check-cashing-window operator to a subway accordionist, each caught mid-sentence between the East Village that was and the one arriving.
The project also became a way for Maher to find his own roots in these streets. His Slovak great-grandparents, Nicholas Lichvar and Mary Kacsmar, came to the Lower East Side in 1899 and settled the family on the same block — two buildings on East 5th Street between Avenues A and B: the Lichvar home at 510, and, a few doors down at 507, the tenement above Chic Choc’s bar where his mother was raised. Today known as Sophie’s, a campaign to save the bar was what spurred the start of the legendary EV Grieve website, bringing the project full circle. It was there, decades before Maher ever picked up a camera, that his grandmother, Margaret “Peggy” Lichvar — who would marry Tony Lombardo, a son of Sicilian immigrants from Menfi — photographed the neighborhood from the inside: the nuns of Most Holy Redeemer, the rooftops, the block, her own family. Maher was documenting the same East Village as an outsider, a stranger stopping strangers, and only found her archive of photographs afterward — never knowing, while he made this work, that she had already made it from within.
Read end to end, it becomes a single collective project with more than two hundred authors. The spirit, the same streets, bars, gardens, and disasters are recounted from countless angles, exploring what was gained and lost, whose fault it was, and whether “the East Village” still exists, and in what form. James closed the series in December 2017 after his first child was due. His farewell described the method:
“I can’t imagine there are many other places where I could run outside for 30 minutes or an hour and come across such inspiring and interesting people, week in and week out, so willing and enthusiastic to stop and chat about their lives… There were many weeks where I was overworked or tired and not feeling like standing on a street corner, and those were always the times where I came back having shared a small moment with the most incredible people… Thanks to everyone who has stopped for an interview and opened up to a complete stranger. I hope I did you all justice.”
The founding subject set the tone by accident, in a quick conversation. Mike Stupin was a bicycle food-delivery guy whose customers kept answering the door half-dressed — “It’s kind of what I do, I put on pants so you don’t have to” — and then, on his way out the door with an order, he delivered what became the project’s thesis: “There are a bunch of characters in the East Village. One of the privileges of this job is that I get to meet them.” Those sentences caught the spirit of what was to come — a magical neighborhood, but one that was losing its stoop culture and impromptu street magic to speculation and transience.
Over the next five and a half years, these characters peeled back the nuance of the neighborhood. Nobody said it more profoundly than the poet Puma Perl, who fled Bensonhurst as a teenage runaway because, as she put it, “Gravesend was death and the Lower East Side was life,” landing in a neighborhood where two revolutions were playing a block apart.
Puma Perl · Writer/Poet/Performer/Former Social Worker The major threads
1. The vanished dangerous city — “cheap but scary”
Nearly every old-timer told a version of the same story: the neighborhood was scary, but it was theirs, and the rent was nothing.
The burned-out ruin: “Half this neighborhood was burnt out; every block had burnt out buildings. It was really empty.” — Joey McGibbon. Mike Bakaty, the tattoo pioneer who opened Fineline when tattooing was still illegal in New York, remembered a dope operation run out of one of those ruins — junkies lined up down the block, the money hauled up on a string in a can, the dope dropped back down — and 55-gallon drums burning on corners in winter.
Mike Bakaty · Tattoo Artist, Owner Fineline Tattoo The bodies: “You’d find bodies in bags in the gardens.” — Jesus Picayo. Anthony Pepe recalled a burglar who fell off the roof and an addict who OD’d on it — “badaboom. Both dead.” And Christopher Tanner, flatly: “you’d walk over dead bodies.”
The heroin economy in plain daylight: “The toilet” was a brand of heroin sold from a building: “Lines from the building to the corner. People in business suits on the way to work in Wall Street, waiting to buy it,” recalled Danny Lama. The street even had its own code: “Reindeer, that was the codeword for Heroin.” — Cosmo Yannis.
The dread that outlasted the danger: “I still get creeped out whenever I go over to Tompkins Square Park… I just cringe when I walk near that Park, because it was so horrible.” — Karen, a retired social worker. As for who kept order, the painter Roger Jazilek — 23 years on the Hells Angels’ block — had a simple answer:
Roger Jazilek The counter, stated by more than one long-timer and often hammered home in the EV Grieve comments: it wasn’t as romantic as the legend says. “I never once did I feel unsafe. If you weren’t stupid and you were not here to buy drugs, you were pretty much left alone.” — reader “Gojira,” a recurring commenter who moved to 11th & B in 1979. Chef Mark Mace put the teenage thrill of it plainly: “The city was a shithole, plain and simple — an absolute shithole. It was everything that you wanted as a teenager.”
2. The dealers-as-protectors paradox
One of the archive’s most unsettling recurring claims — and the comments argued about it — is that the drug dealers ran the blocks safely, and that the busts that cleared them made the streets worse in the short term.
“When the drug dealers were running the neighborhood, there was some control… ‘Is he bothering you? Cause you’re a homegirl.’… They had some kind of clout that doesn’t exist here anymore.” — Jennifer Bonilla.
Anna Pastoressa, who came from Rome to Avenue C in 1983, walked Alphabet City alone at night because cab drivers refused to take her past 1st Avenue — “I’m not taking you to that jungle.” The dealers in the doorways were her escort home. They told thieves, “Do not rob in this neighborhood. Do not come here to steal, because we will beat you up. We don’t want the cops here.” When a neighborhood kid dented her car, a dealer marched him over to apologize; decades later, she says, “he turned into a very nice man,” and the two of them still laugh about it.
Anna Pastoressa · Jack of all trades Eva Dorsey’s block dealer “ran a dojo,” kept kids off the street, and decorated for Christmas; after the midnight helicopter bust, “the street was no longer protected by the drug dealers and ironically became more unsafe.”
The comments supply the unromantic counter, and it belongs in the same frame: “The drug dealers actually did keep their blocks safer, but not out of the goodness of their hearts… to prevent customers who had a wad of cash on them from getting ripped off… It made good business sense.” — reader comment.
3. Why the community actually broke down — the mechanics
This is the analytical spine exploring the story behind the rising rents. Several residents name the exact legal and structural machinery.
Vacancy decontrol (1997) named as the hinge. Wasim Lone, director of housing services at the tenant nonprofit GOLES, dates the break precisely: “After the 1997 vacancy decontrol legislation things changed rapidly… There has been a tenant cleansing and the new order of the day is maximizing rents.” His verdict on three decades of tenant defense was bleak:
Wasim Lone · Director of Housing Services, GOLES (Good Old Lower East Side) The churn: Kate, a rent-stabilized resident of nearly 40 years, lays out the cycle: “the minute the tenant moves out it becomes market value… Then there’s no point in keeping an apartment. You move and there’s no commitment to a neighborhood. That’s why I don’t know my neighbors. They’re only signing 1-year leases… why should they stay?”
A visible metric: “For years, I never saw a moving van on my block; now I see them all the time.” — Sally Young.
The one-way trap: Offered a buyout after winning a landmark housing-court case, jazz drummer Eric Paulin refused: “I love New York, and if I leave, there’s no way I’ll be able to come back and be able to afford to live here.”
The structural philosophy, coming from the top: “Bloomberg… treated the city as though it were the Bloomberg Corporation’s property and his to sign off and sell away.” “Now they’re doing blocks instead of buildings.” — Hal Hirshorn.
The lost stoop culture: “Here you have the best kind of stoops. People are outside not just with family, but also alone, with friends and with strangers.” — Jennifer Brodsky.
The closed on-ramp: There was the recurring lament that you simply cannot arrive the way they did. “You can’t come to New York with a $100 in your pocket anymore.” — Elinor Nauen, who arrived in 1977 with exactly that, in two paper bags. Shopkeeper Kathy Kemp related that opening a store used to be “stupid and easy if you wanted to take the chance… Now you can’t even do that.”
4. The activist’s paradox — they fixed it, then it priced them out
The cruel irony in the archive was often stated outright by the people it happened to: the residents who fought crime and cleaned up the blocks made the neighborhood desirable to the masses, which destroyed the affordability that let them live there.
Phillip Giambri — submariner, actor, storyteller — spent the 1970s forcing a foot patrol out of a corrupt precinct; his block association photographed cops sleeping in their squad cars and used the pictures as leverage. Then he watched the victory turn on him:
Phillip Giambri · Storyteller, Submariner, Actor, Theatre Sound Tech, OTB Announcer, Computer Kathy Von Hartz bought a 10-unit building for $64,000 “because nobody wanted to buy anything here” and chased dealers off with a bullhorn and windshield stickers. In 2013, that fight turned to the developers, specifically a plan to drop a 12-story tower on a small park she’d help make safe for the neighborhood.
5. The deliberate-decline theory
A provocative piece of analysis comes from Pepe Flores, a Puerto Rican daycare teacher and homesteader who taught the children of Philip Glass and Ornette Coleman. He argues the decline wasn’t an accident but a mechanism, tracing it to lost jobs:
“I would associate the decay to the disappearance of the Garment Center as a place for jobs. All these people lost their jobs… Once we lost jobs, then drugs came in, heavy drugs.” “[The city] knew the whole thing about the drug trade that was going on here… They didn’t do nothing because that was a way to gentrify the neighborhood… When you’re doing drugs, you don’t care about housing, education.”
The buildings themselves were the last asset left to strip. Flores’s building posted volunteer guards at night to watch for the men the landlords sent:
Pepe Flores (who was a little camera shy) · Retired, Daycare Teacher Ronald Rayford, a Black actor and activist who did time in the Tombs and Dannemora, extends the argument into a racial-justice indictment: “war on drugs translates to a war on Black folks… It’s just another name for slavery, because it’s free labor.”
6. AIDS — the generation that spent its youth nursing friends to their death
This is the deepest grief in the archive, threaded throughout the project. For a cohort of these people, it was the defining event of their twenties and thirties, and their lives. Miss Joan Marie Moossy — go-go dancer, stage manager, and performer — said it for all of them:
Miss Joan Marie Moossy · Performer Moossy worked for the drag legend Ethyl Eichelberger until his suicide in 1990 — “He had AIDS, and I think he feared the loss of intellect.” The echoes come from every corner of the archive. “I buried so many people here who died of AIDS, young people, adolescents, children.” — Pepe Flores. “So many people went away in the AIDS crisis. I had a lot of friends who died.” — Sven Furberg. Christopher Tanner built a play, The Etiquette of Death, around his aunt “giving death a makeover, so he’ll be easy on her son, because her son is dying of AIDS”; his hardest Hurricane Sandy loss was “throwing away all the art and all my dead lover’s books and his poetry.” And Rev. Jacqui Lewis, on Middle Collegiate Church’s feeding program: “In the time when the doors of churches were closed to people who were living with HIV/AIDs, and dying at rampant rates, our church was open.”
7. The Loisaida elegy — the displacement of the Puerto Rican neighborhood
The erasure of the Latino Lower East Side was the loss of a world — a whole community, a culture of street life, music, and multi-generational family was disappearing. Heidi, a retired teacher in Tompkins Square Park, delivered its eulogy:
“The Latin flavor is not here no more… The Alphabet City flavor, the Latin flavor went, left, bye.” “Before, if you’re my son, you can keep the apartment. Not now… When my generation disappears, they’re going to fix the building and they’re going to sell the apartments.” “I remember Frank Sinatra, ‘New York, New York — if I can make it there.’ That song is no more, that song is not for now.”
Jasmin Olmo grew up in this world — her grandmother was one of the first tenants of the Lillian Wald Houses and ran the tenant patrol for years, with DJs and Spanish bands on the East River every summer weekend.
Jasmin Olmo (and Rocko) · Stay at home mother, Medical Assistant Now, she says, the neighborhood diaspora reconvenes once a year: “Everybody comes back for Loisaida because they know they’ll see people that they haven’t seen in awhile.” And the dead stay in the gardens — Manuel’s stepfather had a corner named for him, Ariel Place, and went into the ground with a coffin “filled with stuff — Dominoes, cigarettes, liquor.”
8. Homesteading and the squatters — the people who built the neighborhood back
A whole class of these residents didn’t rent or buy in the traditional sense — they took abandoned, often roofless buildings from the city, sold for a dollar, and rebuilt them by hand over the years with minimal resources and lots of sweat. They are proud, and they are right that this helped change everything.
“The landlord abandoned the building. Pay us when you can. The rent was $180 a month… Then the city offered to sell us the building for $5,000 in 1981, so we all put in $250 dollars and bought it. And I’m still here.” — Cheryl Pyle, who sanded the floors and did the plumbing herself.
The definitive squatter epic belongs to Siobhan Meow, homeless in 1988, before becoming co-founder of the Umbrella House squat on Avenue C — named because rain through the ruined roof “would go all the way down to the first floor.” Denied a sewer hookup, they tunneled from the basement to the main “24 hours straight for like four days with a chain of people with buckets.” When the city came to evict them, they survived a three-day siege by standing in the windows until the wrecking-ball operator climbed down from his machine and refused to knock the building over. Umbrella House is now a legal low-income co-op.
Siobhan Meow · Anything I could get Copy-shop owner Santo Mollica explained: “It was them who made the neighborhood what it is now because they started living here. It wasn’t just a drug block anymore.” And then he named the pattern that followed: “We kind of wrote the book on that… Get the artists in here and get them in here cheap.”
9. The artists, and why the art actually happened
Half the archive consists of artists — painters, poets, writers, jazz players, dancers, drag performers, filmmakers, sculptors — and the ones who lived through the cheap years are clear-eyed about the ingredient that made it possible: low rent bought time, and proximity bought cross-pollination.
“There were a lot more artists and a lot more creativity because it was affordable… You would gather and, because it wasn’t that expensive, you had a lot of time to be creative. You influenced each other.” — Kim Kalesti. Jazz drummer Eric Paulin, who has been coming to these blocks for almost fifty years, maps the same idea building by building:
Eric Paulin · Musician What killed this spirit was diaspora: “the creative nucleus has really been blown apart… your keyboardist lives in Sunset Park, your singer’s in Jersey City, the drummer lives up in Washington Heights. So it’s really hard to have that creative community.” — Jamey Poole.
The artist’s-life honesty runs the gamut: “I never had any success at all. No one’s ever liked my work… I always say I’m the biggest nobody in the world… The only thing that matters is if somebody loves you, then you are somebody.” — Nico D Smith. And Nancy Blum, who assisted Irving Penn and turned down a lucrative gig photographing the Trumps while broke, because Robert Rauschenberg had told her “You’re an artist, go home and make some art”: “I’ll just starve, and I starved” — living off canned food from the garbage “until the Chinese ladies started beating me to it.”
10. Heritage and immigrant family businesses — “this is history, not a job”
The archive also became an inventory of the disappearing legacy business. For the people who ran them, the store was the family memory, and the closing was a bereavement. (It is also the thread that runs closest to Maher’s own Sicilian and Rusyn immigrant family history a century back.)
Jamie, the check-cashing operator — who declined to be photographed — works the window his grandparents opened in 1946, in the store where his father was killed in a holdup in 1972: “When I walk in there I see my grandmother, I see my grandfather… A job is one thing, but this is history.” He defends the trade — “we were the first ATM machines,” charging less than his competitors on purpose.
John’s of 12th Street has been an Italian restaurant since 1908 and was a Prohibition speakeasy where “Momma John” ran the still, the liquor traveled by pulley so the dining room stayed clean for raids, and Lucky Luciano and the anarchist Carlo Tresca were both regulars. Co-owner Nick Sitnycky: “John’s is what is disappearing in New York… There’s a history; there’s a legacy.”
Nick Sitnycky · Owner, John’s of 12th Street Surma, the Ukrainian shop, was “founded in 1918 by my grandfather, who came through Ellis Island in 1910,” Markian Surmach said — at first selling immigrants “virtually everything… like a P.C. Richard’s,” then pivoting to keep the next generation tied to the old country. And the elegy for all, from Eva Dorsey, closing her shop after 20 years: “Stores like this, it’s the end, period… because of real estate… Like many small businesses, we simply may not make it. If this happens, I think it will be missed.”
11. The two disasters the series witnessed in real time
Because it ran weekly for 5½ years, the column became an accidental chronicle of two catastrophes — and movingly, of the neighborhood’s response to them.
Hurricane Sandy (October 2012) flooded the low blocks and knocked out power for weeks. The mutual-aid stories are the counterweight to every gentrification lament: “We were all in boots trying to drain basements with generators… People would take turns going to Costco… buy milk and pampers for the kids. The burden was on everybody.” — Manny Garcia. Jenny Adams, who raised roughly $12,000 in six days for her flooded-out super and neighbors: “Sandy was a surreal time but it was also one of the best times I’ve ever had. Everybody worked so hard during the day and then at night you made new friends because you didn’t have a phone.”
The March 26, 2015 Second Avenue gas explosion leveled buildings at 2nd Avenue and 7th Street and killed two people. The column profiled the displaced: Diane McLean, a child psychiatrist, had built her apartment from a shell with no ceilings, no bathroom, and two outlets; her definition of the neighborhood was the Veselka waitress who fed a broke, locked-out grad student a triple plate of food — “‘Eat, eat, you have to eat.’… People helped each other out in the East Village.” Thirty-six years later, the fire took it all.
Diane McLean · Child Psychiatrist at Lincoln Medical Center Mildred Guy lost the 45-year family home, where “until this day, the rooms have names” after the family who slept in them.
12. The counter-voices — the archive argues within itself
This is what keeps the series from being a nostalgia machine: a real chorus of people who welcome the change, refuse the mourning, or insist the magic is still here. This spirit was explained by Angel Eyedealism — stratospheric coloratura, theremin player, astrologer, resident since 1983:
Angel Eyedealism (and Marlena) · Stratospheric Coloratura and Performance Artist There were many working to keep the spirit alive: “There’s no building that’s haunted by the ghost of coolness… you can’t just kill the energy. You just have to keep blowing on the embers and eventually the fire will start again.” — Jacquelyn Gallo.
There were the pragmatists: “I’m glad a lot of the changes have taken place here… it’s cleaned up a bit, but I think for the better.” — Tom Kopache. “You’ve got to accept change. If you don’t, you’ve hitched your wagon to the wrong car.” — Kevin Cloutier, who nonetheless adds, “when I see my local shoe repair guy go out of business, that’s just like a symptom of what’s wrong… it’s just unbridled capitalism.”
There were competing threads of arrival and exile, including a paramedic priced out of an Upper East Side sublet: “The first time in my new apartment I felt like this weight was off my shoulders. I slept like a baby… Even if you’re broke you can walk to the Park and get free music.” — Elizabeth Cunningham.
13. Faith, labor, and radical politics — the neighborhood’s counterculture DNA
The East Village didn’t just tolerate radicals; it produced them, and the archive kept turning up the lineage. Gallery owner Wendy Scripps didn’t learn until her thirties why she felt so at home on these blocks: her great-grandfather was Samuel Gompers.
Wendy Scripps · Owner, Art on A Gallery and Wendigo Productions Merle Ratner, a labor organizer, kept a picket photo of her grandmother from Odessa — “the first woman business agent at the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union” — captioned “Don’t be a scab.” Rev. Jacqui Lewis practiced radical welcome as theology: three weddings the Sunday after marriage equality passed, in a congregation dating to 1628. (Her Middle Collegiate sanctuary, the 1892 building, burned down in December 2020 — a devastating footnote.) And Yehuda Safran mounted a philosophical defense of the neighborhood’s poverty, via the French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s book, “The Philosophy of Poverty”: “There’s nothing wrong with being poor. It’s just, society has to allow the poor to be poor… A society that punishes people for being poor is much poorer for it.”
14. Recovery and redemption in place
A striking number of subjects got clean, got out of prison, or got off the street — and then stayed in, or came back to, the same neighborhood that nearly killed them.
Jeff Underwood lost everything to heroin and cocaine a year after arriving — girlfriend, dog, job — and spent years sleeping by the river while working homeless outreach by day, showering at a drop-in center and putting on his agency shirt so no one knew. He now owns a bike shop and a café on Avenue B.
Jeff Underwood · Owner, Continuum Cycles and Bike Shop , Continuum Coffee. Annette “Mistress Evil” Moccaldi, clean about 14 years, found “utopia” here as a teenager and now can’t afford to come back except to visit: “now we’ve got our shit together… and this is what we’ve got to come back to… It wretches my guts.” Anthony Rocco, the Su Casa counselor, 18 years clean and once paralyzed: “It’s funny how God gives you a hand and you have to play it out.” And Brother Rasheim, formerly homeless, now starting his own food ministry: “Life is beautiful.”
15. The music-history witnesses
The series captured living primary sources of the East Village music scene and the birth of Punk Rock — people who were physically present at its founding. Roberta Bayley took the money at CBGB’s door and shot the first Ramones album cover; asked why she stayed through everything, her answer was simple:
Roberta Bayley (and Stella) · Photographer Paul Kostabi, who came from Los Angeles expecting something bigger, on the scene’s intimacy and weight: “There were like 40 punks at CBGB, but they were important. It meant something.” Handsome Dick Manitoba of the Dictators, sober some 30 years, was still running his Avenue B bar as a clubhouse for that culture. And Delphine Blue, on the club era: “I would describe it like a festival… The streets were deserted till noon.” (She’s also the one David Bowie once overheard making a wish — and kissed on the lips.)
A cast of the most memorable people
This archive truly has no best of, as even the short, nondescript interviews were often as profound as the two-parters with squatters. But of the most memorable, some still stand out:
Michael Feeney — 79, fifty years in one building, arrived in 1943 at age 10, in the Korean War at 16, walking Misty a rescued former bait dog. The warmest entry in the archive; his grandchildren found the piece and wrote “THAT’S MY DAD!” in the comments.
Michael Feeney (and Misty) · Electrical Contractor, Marine Alex Harsley — Black photographer, born 1938 in rural South Carolina, a truly unbelievable life: a childhood of abuse and field labor (“I was in a worse position than a slave”), staff photographer for the New York DA’s office at 20, met Coltrane, shot Ali, and still runs the 4th Street Photo Gallery. His life’s geography doubles as a demolition record of downtown New York:
Alex Harsley · Owner, 4th Street Photo Gallery Christopher Reisman — retired 9th Precinct cop, resident since 1969, who helped lay CBGB’s floor for a bar tab and whose partner Andrew Glover was murdered in 1975. His philosophy of policing: “The other 28,000 [cops] exist to protect me and you and our individual inner jerk.”
Miss Joan Marie Moossy — go-go dancer, stage manager to a drag legend, and the archive’s fullest AIDS witness.
Pepe Flores — the daycare teacher whose deliberate-decline analysis is the sharpest political reading in the series, delivered with total warmth for his barrio.
Siobhan Meow — the Umbrella House squatter: 17 years without heat, 18 cats, and a wrecking ball she stared down.
John Cannatella — the actor who sulked in a balcony convinced two funnier newcomers should replace him, until the director yelled: “You idiot! That’s Stiller and Meara!”
Ellen Turrietta — the ink-covered performance artist running a free “bridal shop,” the series’ most-commented (and most-debated) entry; the comments split between delight and genuine worry.
Holly DeRito — A dog rescuer who flies shelter dogs to New York one by one, whose passion revolves around saving animal lives and providing the neighborhood with companionship.
The comments are their own story
Please don’t skip the comment threads. Over the series, they became a second, parallel oral history — the neighborhood reacting to its own portrait, week after week, in a recurring cast of handles (Marty Wombacher, Laura Goggin/”Goggla,” “Gojira,” “THE NOTORIOUS L.I.B.E.R.A.T.I.O.N.,” glamma, Hey19, Spike, esquared, pinhead). Several things happen there that never happen in the interviews.
The subjects comment: Derek Berg posts his dog-photography site and adds, “thank everybody for writing such positive comments about me. It’s a long time since I’ve been called normal,” then becomes a regular contributor to EV Grieve. Owners and old-timers keep answering, right up to café owner Ali Sahin at the end: “Your kind words mean a lot to me and to the people [I] work with.”
Comaraderie grows when Michael Feeney’s kids and grandkids responded to his interview, a reader answered them in the spirit of the series: “Please tell me your grandfather’s favorite brand of whiskey… so that I can sit at his feet for about 3 weeks and listen to all of his stories. My dad passed 8 years ago and took all of his ‘1920s and ’30s’ tales… with him… You should get your dad/grandfather on videotape reminiscing.”
One of the most moving comments in the whole archive is a reader’s own eviction elegy, left under the profile of a food co-op member. Hauling her belongings to a storage unit mid-eviction, a kid on Second Avenue jeers, “Ya got a dead body in there?” — “I stopped and looked at him. ‘No. It’s my life. I’ve been evicted by my landlord.’ ‘Ya want me to kill him?’ ‘No. It’s bad karma… he’ll get his.'” Her conclusion is the whole series in three sentences: “It costs nothing to say hello or just be kind but can be everything. The local dudes who hang around on the corner of Third Street and Second Ave had people skills. They always offered to help… That is community.”
The threads became mutual-aid hubs — a neighbor started an Indiegogo for Diane McLean “the day after the fire started” — and long-running memory banks, with readers trading stories of vanished street characters: the man in a Shakespeare costume, the bagpipe player on 5th & A, and “Dave,” who “sew[ed] pots and pans to his clothes… and walk[ed] down the street clanging away like a knight in armor.”
Hopefully, this archive will turn into a book one day, with commenters frequently saying things like, “I hope these profiles get put into a book. It would make a great collection of neighborhood stories.”
A final pull-quote anthology
“The really interesting stuff is gone because it’s so public. That reminds me of this neighborhood.” — The Baroness, on latex and everything else.
“This neighborhood made me an adult… I was embraced for who I was and welcomed into this place that has an enormously rich history of defiance of the ‘normal.'” — Mike Stuto.
“New York is no longer the source place that it used to be. It’s essential to be here but it’s not essential to live here.” — Jack Sal.
“God if only the city was just a little more upscale. Be careful of what you wish for because once you get that toothpaste out of the tube there’s no putting it back.” — Arthur Nersesian.
“There’s that heroin tattoo. It marks you.” — Rafael Hines, on the destroyed generation.
“I love the East Village no matter what. It still has its grub… I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.” — Lola Sáenz.
“We had nothing, like Janis Joplin said, ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’ We had nothing to lose, so we felt free.” — Margie Segal
Paul Kostabi, punk producer and painter, offered one of the archive’s best consolations:
Paul Kostabi · Musician, Artist, Producer The through-line the whole time is the one Mike Stupin named in week one and the eviction-elegy commenter named at the end: the neighborhood was never the buildings. It was the willingness of strangers to stop, acknowledge each other, and open up. That is what the series documents disappearing, and it is also, exactly, what the series is.
