99% Invisible, “Squatters of the Lower East Side”
These evictions provoked the biggest showdown yet between the city and the squatters. On May 30, 1995, the city sent a small battalion of police in riot gear to the Lower East Side. They had a tank repurposed from the Korean War. Officers took up positions on the rooftops of neighboring buildings. Meanwhile, the squatters […]
Bedford + Bowery, “50 Years Ago: The Summer of Love Brings Pot, Protests and Psychedelic Rock to the East Village”
“Since I had worked on an upstart alternative newspaper at Queens College, I gravitated to the offices of the East Village Other (EVO) where a ragtag bunch of anarchists were putting out a biweekly paper that The New York Times described as ‘a newspaper so countercultural that it made the Village Voice look like a […]
The Cut (NY Mag), “Why Manic Panic Is Still Cool”
The punk scene was in full swing and the East Village was inarguably at the heart of it. Record stores and clubs sprouted from the old hippie storefronts, even as Hare Krishnas in Tompkins Square Park were arrested for playing their bongo music too loudly. Within a few years the park would become such a […]
San Francisco Chronicle, “Lower East Side reaching higher as destination”
If you want a sense of Bluestockings Books, let’s just say it has an uncommon number of volumes by Noam Chomsky. Also, there are three shelves devoted to anarchism. And the fiction section is divided into post-Colonial fiction, feminist fiction and general fiction — with the latter possessing the smallest number of books. It is […]
Bedford and Bowery, “From Anarchist Hangout to Bathhouse to Arcade: The Steamy History of 6 St. Marks”
On a chilly Thursday evening–January 5, 1911 to be exact–a mass of New York’s anarchists, socialists, and radicals were celebrating just 3 blocks north of St. Marks Place at Webster Hall. Prof. Bayard Boyesen of Columbia, and Leonard Abbott, the president of the newly formed Francisco Ferrer Association, along with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, […]