Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE EAST VILLAGE
Once a solidly working-class refuge of immigrants, the East Village, ranging east of
Broadway to Avenue D between Houston and 14th streets, became home to New York's
nonconformist intelligentsia in the early part of the twentieth century; in the 1950s, it
was one of the main haunts of the Beat poets - Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg. By the
1980s it was home to radical artists, including Keith Haring, Jeff Koons and Jean-
Michel Basquiat, while gay icon Quentin Crisp lived on East 3rd St from 1981 till his
death in 1999. During the Nineties, escalating rents forced many people out, and the
East Village is no longer the hotbed of dissidence and artistry that it once was. Never-
theless, it remains one of downtown Manhattan's most vibrant neighbourhoods, with
boutiques, thrift stores, record shops, bars and restaurants, populated by old-world
Ukrainians, students, punks, artists and burn-outs.
