The Poets & Activists of Loisaida
Loisaida is a robust and varied community that includes creatives, activists, and mavericks who cultivated a richly diverse neighborhood. It’s also the subject of one of the many ‘guided tours’ on our East Village Building Blocks website, which contains information on every building in the East Village. We’re taking a look at some key sites and individuals featured on that tour, including Bimbo Rivas, Armando Perez, and Miguel Algarin — three figures key to creating the character and culture of Loisaida, and whose impact and influence continues to withstand the test of time.
Today, the blocks east of Avenue A between 14th and Houston are filled with vegan cafes, herds of Gen-Z NYU students, and scaffoldings galore, but it wasn’t always this way. In the mid-to-late twentieth century, the area was better known as Loisaida. Translating to Lower East Side in Spanglish, this Manhattan neighborhood was an epicenter of Hispanic life, activism, and culture in New York, particularly Puerto Rican.
In the years and decades that followed the economic turmoil of the Great Depression and the upheaval of World War II, New York City, with its robust economic opportunities, shined as a beacon of hope for individuals seeking a better way of life. However, from the 1920s until 1965, restrictive U.S. immigration laws meant those opportunities were quite limited for anyone other than those who already had U.S. citizenship. Among the few groups who fit this requirement were African Americans from the South, and Puerto Ricans. Following the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the South to Northern and Midwestern cities including New York in the first half of the 20th century, in another the “great migration” nearly half a million Puerto Ricans migrated to New York City during the 1950s and 60s in the hope of finding a more prosperous and fruitful life. Many of them settled on the Lower East Side east of Avenue A, along with East Harlem, Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx, and Williamsburg, Bushwick, Sunset Park, and Red Hook, Brooklyn.
The name Loisaida was officially granted to Avenue C, in the heart of this largely Puerto Rican community in the eastern half of the East Village, in 1987. But one of the first uses of the term was in a 1974 poem by activist and poet Bimbo Rivas. It is a love song to his home: “Loisaida, I love you. I dig the way you talk, I dig the way you look.” But love song or not, it is unsparing — in it, he talks about drug-infested pocket parks and a rash of burning buildings.
Rivas was intimately acquainted with both the richness and the roughness of the Lower East Side. A gang member in his youth, he, another Puerto Rico-born local named Armando Perez, and a few other leaders of the gang decided to move in a different direction. They joined together to form CHARAS, which became a hub of community activity at 350 East 10th Street/605 East 9th Street.
The building was originally designed as a school by architect C.B.J. Snyder in the early 1900s. In the early 1970s, it stopped being a school and lay empty and abandoned. It was subsequently revived by a local nonprofit called Adopt-a-Building. With the blessing of the nonprofit, CHARAS took over a wing of the school in 1979 and sponsored after-school programs, held physical fitness programs, and hosted cultural events. CHARAS was eventually evicted from the site in 2001, a couple of years after the Giuliani administration sold the building to a developer. There were widespread protests against the sale, and in 2006 the building was designated a New York City Landmark, protecting it from planned demolition.
In 1992, Rivas died of a heart attack at age 52 while working as a substitute teacher in a Brooklyn classroom. Perez, who served as District Leader of the Lower East Side, also died young; he was killed in 1999 at the age of 51. He is remembered in the name of La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez, a community garden, nature preserve, art space, and open-air theater that CHARAS had helped create in 1976 by clearing out mountains of refuse and trash in a vacant lot. Today the community garden is a green and lively place.
Born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Miguel Algarin spent most of his life drawing inspiration from Manhattan’s streets after moving to New York City with his family at nine years old. Best known as a poet, Algerin is recognized as the founder and leader of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, an iconic Village cultural institution for artists, musicians, and writers alike since its founding in 1973.
Its humble beginnings were in Algarin’s East Village apartment, where he hosted a series of informal readings. Soon though, the Cafe outgrew Algarin’s living room, and moved into 505 East 6th Street, formerly an Irish bar called the Sunshine Cafe. But the organization, built by a diverse coalition of authors and artists who expressed their philosophies of liberation and transformation, continued to garner widespread acclaim and success. They eventually found a permanent home in 1981, after moving to the five-story Old Law Tenement at 236 East 3rd Street. For the past 50 years, the influence of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe has reached far beyond the geographic bounds of Loisaida. But Algarin’s spirit remains a presence. The impact of the great community work of Algarin, Rivas, and Perez is still felt today and continues to shape the community.
These are just a few of the sites that make the rich tapestry of the “Loisaida” community of the East Village. To explore even more, check out our Loisaida guided tour on our East Village Building Blocks website. Some of the other tours on the site include Kleindeutschland, LGBTQ+ Sites, Little Ukraine, Music Venues, Punk Rock, and Yiddish Rialto, among more than a dozen others.