Alphabet City, Manhattan

Founding

Until the early 19th century, much of what is now Alphabet City was an extensive salt marsh, a type of wetland that was part of the East River ecosystem. The wetland was drained, and a patch of the river bed reclaimed, by real estate developers in the early 19th century.

Like many other neighborhoods on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Alphabet City became home to a succession of immigrant groups over the years. By the 1840s and 1850s, much of present-day Alphabet City had become known as "Kleindeutschland" or "Little Germany"; in the mid-19th century, many claimed New York to be the third-largest German-speaking city in the world after Berlin and Vienna, with most of those German speakers residing in and around Alphabet City. Moreover, Kleindeutschland is considered to have been the second substantial non-Anglophone urban ethnic enclave in United States history, after Philadelphia's Germantown.

By the 1880s, most Germans were moving out of Kleindeutschland and relocating Uptown, to the Yorkville section of the Upper East Side. Eastern Europeans replaced Germans as the dominant ethnic group in Alphabet City during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this time, the area was considered part of the Lower East Side, and it became home to Eastern European Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants. It consisted of tenement housing with no running water, and the primary bathing location for residents in the northern half of the area was the Asser Levy bath house located on 23rd Street and Avenue C, north of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town. During this time, it was also the red light district of Manhattan and one of the worst slums in the city.

20th century

By the turn of the 20th century, Alphabet City was among the most densely populated parts of New York City. This density was partially a result of the area's proximity to the city's garment factories, which were the major source of employment for newly arrived immigrants. After the construction of the subway system, workers were able to relocate to other parts of the city that had been too remote, such as the Bronx, and Alphabet City's population decreased dramatically.

By the middle of the 20th century, Alphabet City was again in transition, as thousands of Puerto Ricans began to settle in the neighborhood. By the 1960s and 1970s, what was once Kleindeutschland and the red light district had evolved into "Loisaida" (Spanglish for "Lower East Side"). Alphabet City became an important site for the development and strengthening of Puerto Rican cultural identity in New York (see the Nuyorican Movement). A number of important Nuyorican intellectuals, poets and artists called Loisaida home during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, including Miguel Algarín and Miguel Piñero.

During the 1980s, Alphabet City was home to a mix of Puerto Rican and African American families living alongside struggling artists and musicians (who were mostly young and white). Attracted by the Nuyorican movement, low rents, and creative atmosphere, Alphabet City attracted a growing Bohemian population. At one time it was home to many of the first graffiti writers, b-boys, rappers, and DJs. The area also had high levels of illegal drug activity and violent crime. The Broadway musical Rent portrays some of the positive and negative aspects of this time and place.

Etymology

The original layout of Manhattan streets specified by the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 designated 16 north-south streets specified as 100 feet (30 m) in width, including 12 numbered avenues and four designated by letter located east of First Avenue called Avenue A, Avenue B, etc.

In Midtown and north, Avenue A was eventually renamed as Beekman Place, Sutton Place, York Avenue and Pleasant Avenue; Avenue B was renamed East End Avenue. (There were no avenues farther east in this part of the city.) Farther south, the avenues retained their letter designations.

The name 'Alphabet City' is thought to be of rather recent vintage, as the neighborhood was considered to be simply a part of the Lower East Side for much of its history. Urban historian Peter G. Rowe posits that the name only began to become used in the 1980s, when gentrification spread east from the Village. The term's first appearance in The New York Times is in a 1984 editorial penned by then mayor Ed Koch, appealing to the federal government to aid in fighting crime on the neighborhood's beleaguered streets:

The neighborhood, known as Alphabet City because of its lettered avenues that run easterly from First Avenue to the river, has for years been occupied by a stubbornly persistent plague of street dealers in narcotics whose flagrantly open drug dealing has destroyed the community life of the neighborhood.

A later 1984 Times article describes it using a number of names: "Younger artists ... are moving downtown to an area variously referred to as Alphabetland, Alphabetville, or Alphabet City (Avenues A, B, C and so forth on the Lower East Side of Manhattan)".

Tompkins Square Park riots

In August 1988, a riot erupted in Tompkins Square Park when police arrived to evict a large encampment of homeless people from the park. The police had been sent there to enforce a curfew enacted in response to over a decade of complaints from residents about the round-the-clock lawlessness and noise emanating from the park. The police showed little restraint, with several demonstrators injured, and much ensuing public disapproval.

Gentrification

Alphabet City was one of many neighborhoods in New York to experience gentrification in the 1990s and early 21st century. Multiple factors resulted in lower crime rates and higher rents in Manhattan in general, and Alphabet City in particular. Avenues A through D became distinctly less bohemian in the 21st century than they had been in earlier decades. Apartments have been renovated and formerly abandoned storefronts are now bustling with new restaurants, nightclubs and retail establishments. The area had two murders between July 2015 and July 2016.

The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space opened on Avenue C in the building known as C-Squat in 2012. A living archive of urban activism, the museum explores the history of grassroots movements in the East Village and offers guided walking tours of community gardens, squats, and sites of social change.

Architecture

The streets and avenues of Alphabet City are lined largely by 19th and early-20th century tenements and mid-20th century public housing complexes, although there are plenty of rowhouses, institutional and commercial buildings, and houses of worship as well. The area contains one historic district: the East 10th Street Historic District, designated in 2012 by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC). According to the designation report, “The rare attribution of several of the early residences to noted architect Joseph Trench, and the possible role they played in introducing the Italianate style of architecture to row house design ... enhances the significance of these buildings. Even through the modernizations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the buildings within the East 10th Street Historic District have maintained a cohesive architectural character on an important park setting in the historically and culturally rich East Village neighborhood.”

In recent years, under increasing pressure from local groups such as the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP) for expanded landmark protections in the neighborhood, the LPC has also designated a number of individual landmarks. They include:

Other buildings of note include “Political Row,” a block of stately rowhouses on East 7th Street between Avenues C and D, where political leaders of every kind lived in the 19th century; the landmarked Wheatsworth Bakery building on East 10th Street near Avenue D; and next to it, 143-145 Avenue D, a surviving vestige of the Dry Dock District, which once filled the East River waterfront with bustling industry.

Alphabet City has a surprisingly large number of surviving early 19th century houses connected to the maritime history of the neighborhood, which also are the first houses ever to be built on what had been farmland. GVSHP and others have been trying to protect them, but the LPC has been resistant. Despite local advocacy, an 1835 rowhouse at 316 East 3rd Street was demolished in 2012 for the construction of a 33-unit rental called “The Robyn,” which opened in 2014. In 2010, GVSHP and the East Village Community Coalition asked the LPC to consider for landmark designation 326 and 328 East 4th Street, two Greek Revival rowhouses dating from 1837–41, which over the years housed merchants affiliated with the shipyards, a synagogue, and most recently an art collective called the Uranian Phalanstery. The LPC declined, and those buildings were heightened, altered, and remade into luxury rentals in 2012. The LPC also declined a request to evaluate 285 and 287 East 3rd Street, two highly intact Greek Revival “sister” rowhouses dating from 1837, built on land originally owned by the prominent Fish family. Those buildings still stand, however.

In 2008, nearly the entire Alphabet City area was "downzoned" as part of an effort led by local community groups including GVSHP, the local community board, and local elected officials. In most parts of Alphabet City, the rezoning requires that new development occur in harmony with the low-rise character of the area.

Loisaida

Loisaida /ˌloʊ.iːˈsaɪdə/ is a term derived from the Spanish (and especially Nuyorican) pronunciation of "Lower East Side". Originally coined by poet/activist Bittman "Bimbo" Rivas in his 1974 poem "Loisaida", it now refers to Avenue C in Alphabet City, whose population has largely been Hispanic (mainly Nuyorican) since the 1960s.

Since the 1940s the demography of the neighborhood has changed markedly several times: the addition of the large labor-backed Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village after World War II at the northern end added a lower-middle to middle-class element to the area, which contributed to the eventual gentrification of the area in the 21st century; the construction of large government housing projects south and east of those and the growing Latino population transformed a large swath of the neighborhood into a Latin one until the late 1990s, when low rents outweighed high crime rates and large numbers of artists and students moved to the area. Manhattan's growing Chinatown then expanded into the southern portions of the Lower East Side, but Hispanics are still concentrated in Alphabet City. With crime rates down, the area surrounding Alphabet City, the East Village, and the Lower East Side, is quickly becoming gentrified; the borders of the Lower East Side differ from its historical ones in that Houston Street is now considered the northern edge, and the area north of that between Houston Street and 14th Street is considered Alphabet City. But, because the Alphabet City term is largely a relic of a high-crime era, English-speaking residents refer to Alphabet City as part of the East Village, while Spanish-speaking residents continue to refer to Alphabet City as Loisaida.

There also exists a mixed drink called a Loisaida that gained popularity in 2008. It consists of lime, Olde English malt liquor, and apple cider. The name comes from combining sounds from each of the ingredients, as in L(ime), OE (common abbreviation for Olde English) and "Cida" (cider).

Notable residents