← View All

Tag: beatnik

Where the Beats Sang: Washington Square’s Forgotten Protest

At the start of Fifth Avenue sits the grand Washington Square Arch, welcoming New Yorkers and visitors alike into the heart of Greenwich Village. Today, on a stroll through the park, one might find street artists performing in the empty fountain, college students sharing a quick lunch between classes, and strangers deep in conversation about […]

    Naming a Neighborhood: The East Village

    The area now known as the East Village was historically part of the Lower East Side, which was one of the most densely populated and ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the city, especially during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At that time, it was primarily populated by immigrants, particularly from Eastern, and to a […]

      Eras of American Literature: Allen Ginsberg & Robert Lowell

      At the core of the Beat Generation was beloved East Villager Allen Ginsberg. He challenged the barriers that restricted what writers could print and created a handful of pieces that revolutionized American literature as we know it today. Recently, we discovered an old photograph via the Allen Ginsberg Project that inspired us to take a […]

        The Humble “Nerve Center” of the City: Gem Spa

        The East Village is a rich palimpsest of fascinating histories. If many of them seem to share as their geographic nucleus the corner of 2nd and St Mark’s Place, that’s because, for a hundred years, there stood a 24-hour general store, the mythic stature of which increased with each successive countercultural wave that crashed on […]

          Sharing the Literary Legacy of a Powerful Poet: Amiri Baraka

          Amiri Baraka (October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014), born Everett Leroy “LeRoi” Jones in Newark, was one of Greenwich Village’s most outspoken poets of the Black Arts Movement during the 1960s and ’70s. His political advocacy was both illuminating and confrontational, as he attempted to use his writing to document his experience of blackness […]

          No One Had Ever Heard a Howl Like That Before

          The Beat poets, inextricably linked with the Village and East Village, materialized in the post-WWII American of white picket fences to celebrate all things messy, countercultural, drug-addled, disenfranchised, and unstoppably vital. East Villager Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” was an anthem of this movement, with its power, breathlessness, and breadth of content. And on October 7, 1955, Ginsberg […]

          Happy Birthday Jack Kerouac!

          “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” […]