Punk, tenements, Ukrainian diners and the largest concentration of cheap restaurants in Manhattan. The part of the city that gentrified last and loudest.
What it was
This was the Lower East Side until the 1960s, when the artists and musicians moving in wanted a name that sounded more like Greenwich Village. It had been German — Kleindeutschland, the largest German-speaking settlement outside Europe — then Eastern European Jewish, then Ukrainian and Polish, then Puerto Rican, and each wave left something.
The 1970s and 80s were the bad years and the productive ones: burnt-out buildings, heroin, squats, and CBGB on the Bowery, where Television, Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads all started. CBGB closed in 2006 and the space is now a clothing shop, which is the most on-the-nose thing in New York.
The Tompkins Square Park riot of 1988, when police cleared a homeless encampment, was the flashpoint of the neighbourhood’s fight against gentrification. The gentrification won.
What is still here
St Marks Place — East 8th Street between Third Avenue and Avenue A — is the strip: tattoo parlours, cheap sunglasses, Japanese basement restaurants, bubble tea and a permanent late-night crowd. It is scruffier and more commercial than its reputation.
Tompkins Square Park is the neighbourhood’s living room, with a famously good dog run and a hawk nest people follow closely.
The community gardens are the neighbourhood’s best-kept feature — around forty of them, created on cleared rubble lots in the 1970s and defended through the 90s. 6BC Botanical, La Plaza Cultural and 9th Street Garden open to the public at posted hours and are free.
St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, 1799, is the second-oldest church building in Manhattan and stands on Peter Stuyvesant’s farm; he is buried in the vault.
Veselka on Second Avenue has served pierogi and borscht around the clock since 1954 and is the last of the Ukrainian coffee shops.
Eating and drinking
The best value in Manhattan. Curry Row on East 6th between First and Second is a solid block of South Asian restaurants. Little Tokyo on East 9th and Stuyvesant has a dense run of izakaya and ramen. First and Second Avenues carry most of the bars, and the ones on Avenue B and C get later.
More Neighborhoods
Midtown
Where the skyscrapers, the theatres and most of the hotels are. Nobody who lives in New York would choose to live here, and almost every visitor should stay here once.
Lower Manhattan
The oldest part of the city, where the streets predate the grid and bend around vanished shorelines. Offices by day, increasingly residential by night.
Greenwich Village
Low brick townhouses on streets that ignore the grid, because the Village was a separate settlement before the grid arrived and refused to be redrawn.