When I first visited New York City’s Lower East Side a decade ago, there was a gigantic graffitoed painting of recently murdered Mexican diva, Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, on the side wall of a building on the corner of East Houston Street. It separated the neighbourhood from its more genteel neighbour, the East Village.

Lower East Side street art

Now it’s a billboard for a lending institution.

NYC’s Lower East Side: Remembrances of things past

When visiting New York, I always stay on the Lower East Side with my Australian friend, whom I shall refer to by the name of Dee to protect the innocent. Dee lives a short walk from Chinatown on the Lower East Sire. And as I arrive in the late afternoon I usually arrange to meet Dee after her work in an uptown office megaplex at Lotus, where I can snuggle my chai (yes, dear reader, forgive me, for I am a chai-snuggler) and read for as long as it takes Dee to brave the perils of peak-hour subway.

I walk down Clinton to Lotus and enter: shock horror, an empty Lotus awaits, all darkened and reddened, the arrival of party-going hordes. The chais are gone, the tuna-salad bagels are gone, the piles of the Village Voice are gone. Lotus is now just another hipster bar, one of dozens that continue to pop up in the neighbourhood: the Lower East Side is now a beacon of Manhattan nightlife.

Later, as we eat nearby in the din at the bustlingly gorgeous Schiller’s Liquor Bar, Dee is unmoved and unsurprised. “You know, Alex, if you could see the changes that have happened to the Lower East Side since we moved in eight years ago. When we moved here, it was all Dominican.” The story is a familiar one: this neighbourhood hosted each successive wave of immigrants until the real estate boom flushed out the last corners of cheapish rent on Manhattan island. Thankfully, diversity’s fabric hasn’t been totally unthreaded. The nearby projects still remain, meaning the neighbourhood hasn’t last all of its diversity.

Sunday morning, D Train

The following day, at Soy, a Japanesey hole-in-the-wall on Suffolk between Rivington and Delancey, I meet Nicky, an artist at the Clemente Solo Velez Cultural Centre. Named after a distinguished Puerto Rican poet, it’s a former public school and an architectural landmark distinguished by early 20th-century exuberance. It houses two small theatres and a couple of dozen artist’s studios and is a stalwart of the old Lower East Side. For as long as I’ve visited the neighbourhood, its ground level has been clad in graffitoed scaffolding.

“I’ve had a studio there 16 years,” Nicky says. “At the beginning it didn’t even have locks on the doors. It was a squat, you know - this was a pretty rough neighbourbood. We had to fight the city to keep it, then we had to fight those who wanted it to be just for the Puerto Ricans. I can’t begin to tell you the troubles we’ve had keeping that building. But my rent is ridiculously cheap.” There comes a certain age in one’s life when you can’t have a conversation without talking about the price of real estate.

A scruffy, insouciant, rock ‘n’ roll guide to the Lower East Side

This is a fast-changing world, but that doesn’t mean every travel article about the Lower East Side should be a eulogy of things past. Sure there are Manhattan neighbourhoods with more and better museums, fancier restaurants, better-heeled locals and more camera-genic locales. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find a Manhattan neighbourhood more rock’n’roll than this one.

So here follows my scruffy, insouciant, rock ‘n’ roll guide to the Lower East Side.

• Best Guitar Store. Hipsters love vintage guitars, which means that the neighbourhood boasts some wonderful purveyors of the ax. My favourite: Rivington Guitars. Thanks, Howie for giving me a demo of that 12-string Rickenbacker on that vintage Vox amp, even though you’d just driven 20 hours that weekend to pick up some axes in Ohio, and even though I had to tell you some pathetic lies about how I was “thinking about how to push my music in new directions” to get you to do it. I wish I was you.
• Best Street Art. Hipsters love graffiti, which they call ‘street art’. Check this out.
• Best Bookstore. McNally Robinson, on Prince Street. Technically in Little Italy, this place makes literature hip, and that, friends, is no easy feat.
• Best Restaurant. I am a sucker for two things: hipster women and restaurants with strange symbols in their names. I don’t know if MS Word is even going to let me type this, so let me try: ‘inoteca. Damn, how do I get that apostrophe to face the other way? Long story short: snacky Italian bar-type meals, New York bustle, Italian wine list as long as (but far more interesting than) Dante’s Paradiso. Cheese list factor: stinky (that’s good).
• Best Cinema. Two Boots, corner Avenue A and E 3rd St. Grab a slice of pepperoni pizza in the adjoining pizzeria if puckish. Also technically East Village, but within easy walking distance.
• Best Museum. You have two hours to see a museum in the Lower East Side. Which will it be – New Museum or Tenement Museum? The brand-new New Museum on the Bowery was closed on the day I went to visit, but it seemed real nice, even if New York magazine said it was “over-hyped”. Visiting the Tenement Museum (108 Orchard Street, between Delancey and Broome) is like stumbling onto the set of Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York – as well as being an invaluable reading aid to anyone with a passing interest in a certain kind of New York novel, i.e. anything written by Henry Roth or Michael Chabon.
• Best Knish. I’ve only ever had one knish in my life, and it was at Yonah Schimmel’s Knishery (“Hand Made Baked Knishes”) at 137 E Houston St. That’s a travel writer’s job: to pretend to be an expert about things he knows nothing about. But it was delicious. And it seemed very authentic.
• Best Magazine to Read About New York When In New York. On the one hand, there’s the New Yorker, magazine of choice for picking up hipster librarians on the Subway. (Here’s how you do it: read said magazine on the Subway, wearing something hip and distinctive. Go home. Look up ‘Missed Connections’ on Craigslist. Wait… Keep waiting…) On the other hand, there’s New York magazine, whose cover in the issue I picked up while there was emblazoned with the headline “Post-Crime,” about the city’s historically low crime figures.
• Safest Neighbourhood in Manhattan. According to the the aforementioned New York magazine article, definitely not the Lower East Side, which boasted in 2007 two murders, seven rapes, 215 robberies, 121 assaults and 114 burglaries. Please bear in mind: I quote these figures not to alarm but to inform. These are historically low figures. You are more likely to have your tongue scalded by a Starbuck’s coffee than to be the victim of crime in the Lower East Side (I just made that up, but it’s probably true). Incidentally, a quick perusal of the figures suggests the safest neighbourhood in Manhattan is probably Chelsea (where hipsters go to die, and where the score is 0, 8, 144, 151, 108).

Finally, here is my “Favourite Cheesy Thing to do in New York.” This has nothing to do with the Lower East Side, but the winner is the Empire State Building, hands down, for the view that really makes you understand why hipster hero Kurt Vonnegut called Manhattan ‘Skyscraper National Park’.

–Alex Landragin

Planning a trip? Browse Viator’s New York City tours & things to do in New York. And if you haven’t already entered Viator’s NYC Rock ‘n’ Walking Tour contest, then a hipster you are not.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Destinations, Food, Drink & Travel, List Mania: Viator's Top Picks, Suggested Itineraries, The Art of Travel, Travel Inspiration, USA, Canada, Mexico. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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