Alphabet City

When I was growing up, the East Village was known as Alphabet City. In those days the Bowery still had Bowery bums, and the residential hotels and dive bars that catered to them. (My favorite of which was called "Hank's Crystal Palace" -- constanly filled with guys that came in and threw piles of change on the bar to get their alchohol fix. It wouldn't be uncommon for one of these gentlemen to nod off and fall right off their bar stool. At this no one would bat an eye or go to help the poor soul either, as I guess it was par for the course.)

The first time I ventured past 3rd Avenue/Bowery and into what was then the heart of Alphabet City, Tompkins Square Park, I felt like a rebel. Today that sounds ridiculous, but Alphabet City was once a much more dangerous (and interesting) place. Avenue A was really bohemian, a lot of artists and poets and punk rockers. Tompkins Square was the social center of a punk rock and anarchist movement and housed a shantytown filled with homeless people. Once you ventured past Tompkins Square you really were in the ghetto. The city let this entire neighborhood -- from Avenue A to Avenue D completely disintegrate. Most buildings were barely standing. It looked like, and to some extent was, a war zone. I found these pictures to illustrate my point. It's hard to equate these images to the Alphabet City of today, but this is what it was when I was growing up, and when I first lived there:





I also found this amazing picture on Flickr. Most buildings in Alphabet City back were surrounded by lots with leftover demolition, burned out cars, ripped up furniture, etc. This proves the point:



When I was in high school I spent a lot of my time in this area. I went to the matinees at CBGB which were hardcore, occasionally ska and filled with young angry youth (so much so that they eventually cancelled them permanently due to the excessive figthing that took place). There were also a lot of local bands that were famous in punk rock circles: Nausea, Reagan Youth, the Casualties. They did a lot of shows at the Tompkins Square Bandshell and in squats. Things eventually moved over to ABC No Rio, a punk rock collective that still exists today on Rivington Street.

Most of the buildings between Avenue B and Avenue D were not legally livable so the young punk runaways/artists/anarchists took them over and lived in them. I spent a lot of time in burned out buildings in my teen years as a result. It was pretty dangerous -- the buildings were not secure and back then there was a lot of crime in the area -- it was a huge drug neighborhood at the time and well into the 90s. Also, the buildings were literally falling apart, alot of them had no windows, missing floors, no ceilings, were filled with rats. There were a few that were well known as shooting galleries which we steered clear of. Some people put incredible effort into their spaces, and they ended up being pretty nice. Most squatters figtured out ways to steal electricity from street lamps, so they had lights and a few even had heat. Suffice it to say it was a pretty different place then it is today.

One of the squats was called Lucky 13, and I remember going to shows there. The shows were held in the basement with jerry-rigged lightbulbs and electricity for amps etc. A bunch of 16-21 year olds squeezed into a basement of an illegal squat with illegal electricity -- it's a wonder we all didn't die in some kind of horrible inferno. There were also shows at Charas Hall which up until not too long ago was a community center. I got into a fight with a Puerto Rican dude outside one of those shows and we ended up chasing the guy down the street. I got into a lot of trouble for this at the time, as there was an uneasy truce between the punk rock kids and the large Puerto Rican community that inhabited the area. It's hard to imagine how disenfranchised people felt back then, but the city had simply completely abandoned large areas of the city including the South Bronx and the Lower East Side, and there was a really high level of poverty and crime, and with it a lot of anger and resentment that came with it.

My first apartment was on Avenue B and was really dicey. The first day in my apartment I came home to find crow bar marks on my door signifying someone's attempt at a break-in. There was a heroin "store" around the corner: Back then there was a huge heroin trade in the area, and they had a pretty orderly system--they would take over a store front or a garage or something and then people would show up, get in line, go in, buy, shoot and then stumble down the street until they passed out. Many times I would find junkies in the hallway of my building with needles still in their arms. That building at the time housed young musicians, and everyone not only lived in their apartments, but rehearsed there as well. At any given moment you could hear the sounds of wailing guitars and crashing drums. Todd from Murphy's Law lived there, the Clowns for Progress were right next door. (Johnny T. who is now Ryan Adams drummer was there at the time). My friend Roy who was in Nausea crashed there for a while (he went on to play with Ozzy and Dave Navarro). I feel a lot of buildings back then were like that: The area sucked so the only people that wanted to live in them were the young artists who all already knew each other. There was a real sense of community back then which had a lot to do with your day to day health and survival. Of course, we didn't see it that way then. At the time, we were just having fun.