East Village Art Guide
The East Village is ground zero for downtown New York culture — the neighborhood where the Beat Generation gave way to punk, punk gave way to graffiti, and graffiti gave way to a gallery boom that briefly made this 40-square-block stretch the most electric art scene on earth. It’s been gentrified within an inch of its life since then, but the bones are still there if you know where to look.
1. Astor Place Cube (Alamo)
Astor Place, Lafayette at 8th Street
Tony Rosenthal’s “Alamo” — everyone just calls it the Cube — has stood at the gateway to St. Marks Place since 1967, and it’s probably the most democratic piece of public art in New York. Made from Cor-Ten steel in the minimalist tradition of the era, it rotates on a pin, which means at any given moment someone is either sitting on the base, tagging it, or slowly spinning it while their friends watch. It has witnessed the full arc of this neighborhood: the bohemia of the ’60s, the Warhol crowd, the punk explosion, the heroin years, the gallery boom, the K-Mart, and now the luxury glass towers rising on all sides. Rosenthal placed it well. Every era of the East Village passes through here.
2. The Dom / Electric Circus (now Chipotle)
19-25 St. Marks Place
Before this block became a parade of noodle shops and chain restaurants, the buildings at 19-25 St. Marks were the center of the universe — at least for a few years in the ’60s. Andy Warhol sublet the ground floor ballroom in 1966, renamed it The Dom (Polish for “home”), and installed the Velvet Underground as house band for his multimedia event called “Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” Nico performed weekly. The Factory crowd descended. After Warhol moved on, the space reopened in 1967 as the Electric Circus, a full psychedelic-themed club that ran until someone left a bomb on the dance floor — allegedly the Black Panthers — and the crowds predictably stopped coming. It closed in 1971. The building’s history goes back further: in the 1870s it was a German dance hall called Arlington Hall, where Teddy Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst both gave speeches, and where Italian and Jewish gangsters exchanged gunfire on the dance floor in 1914. Now enjoy your burrito.
3. Club 57
57 St. Marks Place
In the basement of the Holy Cross Polish National Church, one of the most influential art clubs of the late 20th century operated from 1978 to 1983. Club 57 was run by Ann Magnuson and became the incubator for the generation that would define the ’80s art world: Keith Haring curated shows here and performed neo-dada poems inside a giant television set. Kenny Scharf brought his day-glo cartoon universe. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fab Five Freddy, Joey Arias, Madonna, and the B-52s were all regulars. Magnuson described the crowd as “pointy-toed hipsters, girls in rockabilly petticoats, spandex pants, and thrift-store stiletto heels — suburban refugees who had run away from home.” Black lights, monster movies, theme parties, drugs, and orgiastic sex. As the artists got more famous, they graduated to more expensive venues, and the club closed in 1983. But the DNA of the New York art world in that decade was written here in a church basement on St. Marks.
4. Gracie Mansion Gallery Site
15 St. Marks Place
Born Anne Mayhew-Young, art dealer Gracie Mansion renamed herself after the mayor’s residence — which tells you everything about the attitude of the East Village gallery scene. Unable to find galleries willing to show her work or her friends’ work, she launched her own, starting with the legendary “Limo Show”: she rented a limousine, parked it in SoHo at Spring and West Broadway, dressed as a tourist, served champagne to passersby, and pitched her friends’ art from the back seat. From that stunt she built one of the defining galleries of the ’80s East Village boom, eventually landing at 15 St. Marks and later 532 Broadway. Her shows helped establish the careers of artists who went on to define the era, and her operation at this address on “the once former punk rock St. Marks Street” — as she’d describe it — was a fulcrum of the whole scene.
5. Fun Gallery Site
229 East 11th Street
Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery is where the graffiti world met the gallery world, and the results were explosive. It started in 1981 when Astor invited Futura 2000 to paint a mural in her apartment on East 3rd Street and threw an art opening barbecue around it. Kenny Scharf showed up and started “customizing” appliances. Keith Haring arrived. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Fab Five Freddy. Jeffrey Deitch. The gallery that grew out of that party gave first solo shows to Basquiat, Lee Quinones, Keith Haring, and others who would become household names. Scharf named it “FUN GALLERY” for his show, and it stuck. Each exhibition transformed the space entirely: Dondi White flooded it with graffiti heads from every borough; Jane Dickson painted the walls neon green and hung her vinyl cityscapes. What the gallery did that almost no institution managed — then or since — was facilitate the growth of its artists without stripping them of their street credibility. The address on East 11th is now just apartments, but this was a genuinely historic room.
6. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Studio
57 Great Jones Street
The building at 57 Great Jones Street has a history that reads like a fever dream of downtown New York mythology. In the Civil War era it was a horse stable. By the early 1900s it was a dance hall and mob hangout — in 1905 a gangster “slipped and fell on a bullet” inside the building and survived for exactly two days before someone else shot him. By the 1980s, Andy Warhol owned it, and he rented the loft to Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat had started out as a graffiti writer under the tag SAMO, scrawling cryptic phrases across the East Village. He played in a punk-noise band called Gray with Vincent Gallo. He wandered through the scene — CBGB, Max’s Kansas City, the Mudd Club — until the downtown art world caught up with him and the galleries Annina Nosei, Larry Gagosian, and Mary Boone started fighting over his work. He made much of that work here, in Warhol’s building. After Warhol died, Basquiat spiraled. He overdosed on heroin in this building on August 12, 1988, at 27. The building now houses a secretive Japanese restaurant called Bohemian. The layers of history are almost too much.
7. CBGB / Extra Place Alley
315 Bowery / Extra Place (off 1st Street, east of Bowery)
CBGB is gone — the actual club is now a John Varvatos boutique where you can buy jeans for $300 in the room where the Ramones invented punk rock. But tucked just around the corner is Extra Place, a tiny alley that was CBGB’s back door, and before that, one of the great overlooked slices of New York history. The alley dates to the early 19th century: when the Great Grid divided Manhattan into blocks, a strip of the old Minthorne farm was too small to be a proper street, so it became officially known as “Extra Street.” It served as a speakeasie corridor during Prohibition and an industrial back alley before CBGB made it world-famous as an exit route from one of the most important clubs in American music history. Patti Smith played here. Television. Blondie. Talking Heads. The Heartbreakers. When you think about the bands that walked out that back door into this alley, it’s still genuinely affecting, even with the overpriced tacos next door.
8. William S. Burroughs’ Bunker
222 Bowery
From 1974 to 1997, William S. Burroughs lived in a windowless former YMCA locker room in a building on the Bowery, and he called it, with characteristic dark humor, “The Bunker.” The hodgepodge inside was pure Burroughs: typewriter, pistol, shoe shine kit, blowdarts, pinwheels, and a copy of “The Medical Implications of Karate Blows.” With CBGB just around the corner, he found himself at the center of the punk world he’d inadvertently helped inspire — it wasn’t unusual for Patti Smith to stop by, and Max’s Kansas City was nearby for other sightings. The punks revered him as a godfather figure, and he took to the role. When Burroughs finally decamped to Lawrence, Kansas in the ’80s, he kept the Bunker as his New York base until his death in 1997. His friend, the poet John Giorno, inherited the space and has kept Burroughs’ bedroom essentially intact. The building is still there. The walls have heard things.
9. McSorley’s Old Ale House
15 East 7th Street
McSorley’s has been on East 7th Street since 1854 and it smells exactly like you’d expect a bar that’s been open since 1854 to smell — stale onions, old beer, and something you can’t quite identify. The wishbones left over the bar were placed there by WWI soldiers who promised to return for them; most didn’t. The bar didn’t admit women until 1970, and only then after a court order. Painter John Sloan kept coming back his whole career for the working-class vibe. E.E. Cummings and journalist Joseph Mitchell made it a second office — Mitchell’s portrait of the place in “The Old House at Home” is one of the best pieces of writing about a bar ever committed to paper. In the first half of the 20th century it was a genuine literary salon for artists and writers who found inspiration in the company of the working people who drank here. It’s now mostly a tourist destination, but the room itself is unchanged, and the layers of history embedded in it are real.
10. Cafe Le Metro Site
149 Second Avenue
The space at 149 Second Avenue is now a bro bar called 13th Step, but in the early 1960s it was Cafe Le Metro, one of the most important poetry venues in New York. When the Beat Generation got priced out of Greenwich Village, they migrated east and found this coffeehouse, which became ground zero for the scene: Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, and Ed Sanders all read here regularly. The city shut it down in 1964 for hosting poetry readings without an entertainment license — a genuinely Kafka-esque act of municipal censorship — but the coffeehouse fought back and eventually prevailed on civil liberties grounds, only to close anyway two years later as the neighborhood kept changing. The 1960 photograph of Ted Berrigan and Ed Sanders at Le Metro, shot by Fred W. McDarrah, is one of the iconic images of the East Village literary moment.
11. Allen Ginsberg’s Apartments
206 East 7th Street / 437 East 12th Street
Allen Ginsberg lived in the East Village at two different moments in his life, and both addresses functioned as literary salons. He was at 206 East 7th Street from 1952 to 1953, during the early formation of the Beat circle, and at 437 East 12th Street from the 1970s through the ’90s, by which point he was a living monument of American letters holding court for a new generation. Jack Kerouac, who wrote about the East Village in “Vision of Cody,” described the park in autumn with the same weight he gave the open road — for the Beats, Tompkins Square Park and its surrounding streets were as mythologized as the highway. A 1959 silent film shot in the East Village shows Ginsberg, Kerouac, Lucien Carr, and their circle goofing around 3rd Avenue, and the footage has the quality of a home movie from a world that no longer exists. The neighborhood was their village, not Greenwich’s.
12. Tompkins Square Park
East 7th to East 10th Street, Avenue A to Avenue B
Tompkins Square Park is the geographic and spiritual center of the East Village. The park has been a site of political upheaval going back to the 1874 Tompkins Square Riot, when police attacked a crowd of unemployed workers. In the 1960s it was the Beat and hippie gathering point. By the ’80s it had become a tent city for the homeless — an encampment that the city violently cleared in 1988 in a police riot that became a defining moment of East Village resistance. Artists documented the crack epidemic and AIDs crisis from these benches. Punk kids from CBGB crossed paths with Puerto Rican families, drug dealers, and abstract painters all within the same few acres. The park has been cleaned up and the tent city is long gone, but the political edge of the neighborhood was forged in this space, and the community garden movement that defines East Village activist culture today has roots in the garden plots that sprouted along the park’s margins.
13. Jim Power’s Mosaic Trail
2nd Avenue and surrounding streets
Since 1985, a man named Jim Power has been installing hand-made mosaic tiles on lampposts throughout the East Village — a one-man public art project that constitutes one of the most eccentric and moving acts of civic devotion in New York history. Each pole is a tribute to a different piece of neighborhood history: theaters, musicians, gangsters, and cultural figures that have passed through. Power has been doing this essentially homeless, treating it as a personal obligation rather than a career. The mosaics have chipped and weathered and been repaired and chipped again, and Power has kept coming back to fix them. Walking the 2nd Avenue stretch with attention to these poles is to receive a kind of unofficial archive of East Village memory, encoded in colored tile by a man who decided that preserving it was his job, whether anyone paid him or not.
14. Basquiat’s SAMO Tags (East Village Streets)
Various locations, East Village
Before Jean-Michel Basquiat was a gallery sensation, he was SAMO — “Same Old Shit” — a graffiti writer whose cryptic, poetic phrases appeared on walls and lampposts throughout the East Village and SoHo in the late 1970s. The tags weren’t throwies or bubble letters; they were aphorisms, fragments, little land mines of meaning dropped into the visual noise of the city. “SAMO© as an escape clause.” “SAMO© as an end to mindwash religion, nowhere politics, and bogus philosophy.” The tags announced someone who was paying close attention to the language of power and mocking it. By the early ’80s SAMO had officially died — Basquiat tagged “SAMO IS DEAD” around downtown — and Jean-Michel the painter had arrived. His path from the streets to the gallery walls at 57 Great Jones Street to the cover of the New York Times Magazine is one of the most compressed and tragic trajectories in American art history, and it started on these blocks, with a marker and a wall.
15. Physical Graffiti Buildings
96-98 St. Marks Place
These two tenement buildings were selected in 1975 by designer Peter Corriston to grace the cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Physical Graffiti” double album, mainly because the window spacing fit the letters perfectly and they read as definitively, gritty New York. The Rolling Stones came back to the same buildings in 1981 for the “Waiting on a Friend” video. In other words: to the rest of the world, this is what the East Village looked like — two anonymous tenement buildings on a street that was, at that moment, genuinely rough. The buildings are still apartments. There’s a foot rub place in the basement and a tea shop that has reportedly named itself “Physical GraffiTea,” which is the kind of thing that happens when a neighborhood’s edge gets converted into décor.
The East Village’s cultural history is so densely layered that almost every block holds a ghost story — the apartment where a poet held court, the basement where a movement started, the wall where a future art star left his tag. What made the neighborhood extraordinary was the combination of cheap rents, physical density, and genuine danger that threw artists, writers, punks, graffiti writers, and gallerists into daily proximity. That friction produced something irreplaceable. The rents aren’t cheap anymore, and the danger has largely been priced out along with everything else. But the record is here, encoded in the streets.