Do you know the East Village?

To Latino kids growing up in Alphabet City, it's still the LES, but real estate developers and hipsters have been calling it the East Village at least since the 1960s.

There's a great piece in today's Times about the history and ongoing class and property rights politics of the neighborhood, along with some audio/visual downloads and reading/viewing lists you might find fun.

Here's the start of the article, by John Strausbaugh:

FOR a long time the East Village was an urban frontier. The upper half of the Lower East Side, stretching from Houston Street north to 14th Street, and from Third Avenue and the Bowery to the East River, it was a toehold in America for generations of new immigrants — Irish, German, Jewish, Ukrainian, Puerto Rican and others — and a magnet for artists, bohemians, radicals and reformers. It has often been ravaged by grueling poverty and neglect. But it was also an area of intense cultural activity that changed the world.

Beginning in the 1980s and accelerating in the 2000s, new waves of affluent “immigrants” came to tame the frontier. Condominium towers reared up from blocks of old tenements. Many tenements themselves were renovated, with expensive rents and lofts worth more than a million dollars. Artists’ studios and corner bodegas gave way to chic shops and trendy bistros.

The East Village has been dragged up-market, but isn’t going without a fight.

Read the rest of the article here.

Click here for mp3 downloads of Strausbaugh's walking tour.

You can also find a video spot with some great footage here. Look for the piece called "Art and Unrest in the East Village"