Building Blocks in the East Village, One Story At A Time…

You often hear it said that every building tells a story. This insight sounds reasonable enough. But if you don’t know what the story is, you’ll find yourself standing in front of a taciturn building wondering what you’re looking at. This would be a shame, particularly in a neighborhood like the East Village, where so many fascinating histories converge. To address this problem, we set out to gather information on every site in the neighborhood in order to make it easily accessible to everyone. This effort involved research into 2,200 properties, give or take, and took us ten years to complete (but who’s counting). The result is East Village Building Blocks.

This resource consists of a comprehensive map that allows you to go block by block, learning about each building along the way (you can also just look up any building individually). In order to gather the available information on your own, you would have had to: 

• Comb through old property tax records at the New York City Municipal Archives to determine the date of construction of buildings built before 1866, the time when the city started requiring permits for new construction;
• Consult the 1853 Perris map, among other historic maps, to see which existing buildings had been built by then;
• Examine hard copies of all the permits issued by the Department of Buildings to glean information about changes to each building over time;
• Dig through the Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, a weekly publication that, starting in 1868, recorded all conveyances, liens, mortgages, and permits in New York City and surroundings;
• Access 1940s tax photos; 
• Review numerous neighborhood histories; and much else.

As luck would have it, we did all that, so that you won’t have to. You can just go to the map, pick a building and discover its date of construction, original architect, original owners, and original use. You can also read about famous tenants and events associated with it, and find links to additional documents with further information.

This video clip introduces East Village Building Blocks and, by way of example, gives you a sense of what you would learn from looking into 131 2nd Avenue (36 St Mark’s Place).

Beyond researching individual sites, we’ve assembled a wide range of tours that help you visit the neighborhood guided by any of several of the histories that unfolded in the East Village.  Do you want to visit the site of historic speeches by Frederick Douglass and of the first free Black settlement in North America? Take the African American History Tour. Do you want to check out buildings associated with the largest German community in the world during the turn of the 19th century outside of Berlin and Vienna? Take the Kleindeutschland Tour. And why stop there? Do a tour of sites connected to the Yiddish Rialto, Little Ukraine, Loisaida, punk rock, the squats movement, among many other developments. Together, these tours tell the story of the shifting ethnic, cultural, and commercial tides of the East Village and New York City over two centuries.

Beyond researching individual sites, we’ve assembled a wide range of tours that help you visit the neighborhood guided by any of several of the histories that unfolded in the East Village.  

Finally, East Village Building Blocks also encourages you to share images, artwork, memories, and histories related to any East Village site. That way, everyone can collaborate in the telling of the neighborhood’s story. Here is a video clip of a submission made by an artist inspired by the building on 131 2nd Avenue. 

We invite you to get lost exploring East Village Building Blocks, and to use it to help you get lost exploring the neighborhood itself.