The East Village – Here, There and Everywhere
Commentary by Edd Merritt,
September 9, 2010, page 14.....

Thinking about plans for East Charlotte’s village triggered a raft of memories of another East Village in my life.
It was Thanksgiving my freshman year in college, 1960. I was east; my family turkey was west. So my Minnesota friend Tom and I did what any self-respecting New England college students would, we hopped the train to New York City and checked in to Bellevue Hospital, where Tom’s brother-in-law, a Bellevue physician, got us residents’ quarters. We were close to the “village,” which is what we really wanted to see, New York rookies that we were. We went to watch a folk singer fresh in from Brooklyn named Richie Havens. He was playing a small club where the audience didn’t applaud after songs; they snapped their fingers ’cause this was 1960, man. You know, “Hello lamppost, what ya knowin’? I come to watch your flowers growin’,” and all that other stuff growing in Brooklyn besides rhymes.
That was my introduction to Greenwich Village. Five years later I returned, this time a Navy recruit down from Rhode Island, hoping to lose the fleet and hang out with musicians. Larry Coryell had just started as Chico Hamilton’s guitarist. Larry was friends with my hitch-hiking-mate Bruce, and we juiced up in an East Village apartment watching Tom Waits’ “yellow moon” punch a hole in the nighttime.
Ah yes, I thought, the real village. I could probably learn some things from it. In 1968, I moved to New York, and I did learn.
I learned you could have horses in the middle of Manhattan, except they were named Harley and Triumph and Sportster instead of Morgan and Percheron and filly. The New York City chapter of Hells Angels lived on Third Street. “Stay away from them,” we were told. “They’re mean mothers.” But we knew better. We knew that they, like their Mafia brethren just over the border in Little Italy, could, in fact, shoot straight when it came time to protect their turf. And if you were a neighbor, you were in good hands.
I learned that finding good pubs and restaurants didn’t require a limousine, and I could make it to Slugger Anne’s Bar in five minutes, with Slugger Anne herself patrolling the tables, her grandchild and Andy Warhol model Jackie Curtis – sometimes male, sometimes female – popping in to greet “his” gram. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but Candy Darling was the person behind the bar serving me beer.
I learned what “soul food” meant at Princess Pamela’s.
Tompkins Square was the East Village complement to Baptist Corners here, and the Frog Pond Bar, run by two Albanian brothers and their friend Joe Horstman, was my pub where the cops and firemen fresh off duty stopped before heading home to Brooklyn. A college friend lived next door. He made the mistake of opening his apartment to a stranger one night and paid cash rather than suffer a sliced throat.
I, on the other hand, paid very little to see the Grateful Dead live at the Fillmore East and traipsed down the street to see folksinger Dave Van Ronk in a Bertolt production which, unfortunately, didn’t make it through previews.
Fugs’ founder Ed Sanders ran the Peace Eye Bookstore while putting out records with funky titles such as, “It Crawled into my Hand – Honest,” the cover photo showing a joint in Tuli Kupferberg’s palm.
Diversity with a twinge is what you’d call New York’s East Village then. It was home to many different types, artists to Angels, natives and newcomers. Its smallness nestled warmly among the towers of Manhattan. You knew your neighbors. Walking was a requirement unless you were heading “uptown.”
There was a natural – perhaps necessary – calming of traffic. The lines of demarcation of the village were clearly understood – 14th Street north, the alphabet avenues east, Broadway west and Houston south. Below that you were in bocce country.
From what I hear, it has since turned urbane. I think I’d miss the rawness of the ’60s, but, then, who now would pay $2 for a double-feature movie and have to search diligently to find seats with cushions?
As our planning for East Charlotte continues, I think I will reflect on that other East Village, comparing elements – not the least of which are signs of why, exactly, we refer to these places as villages, one hoping to remain countrified, the other holding its own special character within a metropolis. To me, villages indicate the need for community. They are the people that populate them, who give them character and make them interesting.

Voices leading from a sad cafe
Smiling faces try to understand
I saw a shadow touch a shadow’s hand
On Bleeker Street.

-Simon and Garfunkel – Bleeker Street