East Village

Residential and commercial section of lower Manhattan, New York City. Located between 14th and Houston streets east of the Bowery, it was formerly considered part of the Lower East Side; the designation ‘East Village’ came into general use in the 1950s and 1960s. Part of the farm of Peter Stuyvesant, the first governor of New York (New Amsterdam) was located in this area, and he is buried in the churchyard of St-Mark's-in-the-Bowery here.

East Village has seen many waves of immigration. In the 19th century it was a predominantly German and Irish neighbourhood, and was sometimes referred to as ‘Little Germany’. However, after 1900 it became home to Jews from Eastern Europe, who were followed from the 1940s onwards by Poles, Ukrainians, and Puerto Ricans. By the 1950s, its residents included artists spilling over from Greenwich Village, and it gained a reputation as a beatnik and hippie quarter, home to prominent anti-establishment figures such as the US poet Ginsberg. Gentrification set in by the 1980s, but the East Village remains synonymous with the counterculture in various forms, from punk musicians to New York University art and drama students to activists and the homeless living in Tompkins Square Park.