Alea's children: the avant-garde on the Lower East Side, 1960-1970 - Lower East Side Retrospective

African American Review, Winter, 1993 by Lorenzo Thomas

A century ago the area known as New York's Lower East Aside was among the most depressed neighborhoods in the city. As Milton Meltzer has noted, it had the distinction of being "the most crowded slum district in the city, and probably in the world," with an 1890 population density of 37 persons per dwelling (73-75)-half a million people in a tight comer of Manhattan.

Strangely enough, the Lower East Side is also a central location of a great deal of American popular culture. A steady flow of creative works have emanated from the tenements at the edge of the Big Apple.

The avant-garde movement of the Lower East Side in the early 1960s--when it turned, for some people at least, into the "East Village"--was a remarkable period. Grim though the walk-ups might have been, the atmosphere of creative and artistic energy was exhilarating. There was a ludic buoyancy--perhaps from hunger, or too much herbal tea. Maybe it was because there was so much jazz in the air, maybe because the poets knew the musicians who knew the painters who knew the dancers.

Historians like to fix and x-ray avant-garde movements and analyze them in terms of process or product. Those who find themselves attracted to such vortices, however, know that the avant-garde is less about change in the arts than it is about genuine experimentation in social relations. "America in the fifties," writes Ron Sukenick in Down and In: Life in the Underground, "had large numbers of people in what today would be cared internal exile, a condition creating a kind of subversive sensibility maybe best described by the title Herb Gold refused to relinquish, The Man Who Was Not With It. In this mode, even screwing up became a form of resistance" (96).

The artistic circles attracted people who were well-educated, curious about other cultures, and widely read. The work of African American writers and artists on the Lower East Side scene was directly influenced by the low-rent cosmopolitanism of their environs. As Michel Oren notes in his excellent study of the Umbra grou,

the general freedom of the neighborhood made itself felt in the Umbra poets' life styles and in their poems. From 1960 to 1965 the "LES" was also the locus of a "ferment" in American letters that revolved around a series of coffee-house poetry readings, just as in the '50s and early '60s the single 10th Street block between Third and Fourth Avenues had been home to seven co-op art galleries ... and hangout of the Abstract Expressionists. (185) The relative freedom that Oren speaks of in this passage is more specifically characterized in his quotation from Brenda Walcott to the effect that the neighborhood atmosphere was one of "|a shaky truce'" between its diverse ethnic and socio-economic factions.

Bohemian artists are, by definition, people determined not to do what is expected of them. They are usually bright enough to aspire to leadership yet educated enough to feel dissatisfied and skeptical. Often, if they are from minority groups that feel oppressed, they are also the carefully prepared but unwitting vicars of their elders' desire.

Some of the younger artists came to the Lower East Side from the South or Midwest. Others, like poet David Henderson, were "uptown boys downtown." In my own case, I was a kid from Long Island who thought he had only one river to cross. To all comers, the Lower East Side offered what La Boheme has always offered--a range of possibilities from the creatively electrifying to the irremediably lethal.

What had once been the "heartland of Yiddish culture" soon was distinguished, according to Judd L. Teller, by "the imprint of three distinctive and separate segments--the Puerto Ricans, the Ukrainians who entered the United States from Germany after World War II, and the New Bohemians" (251-52). It is clear, though, that something of the intellectual vivacity that had marked the Cafe Royal in the 1920s and '30s was still alive in coffeehouses such as the Deux Megots and the Metro, where a new generation of poets held forth, debated the same isms, and quarreled about matters having nothing to do with Parnassus.

Mainstream media attention lavished on the antics of the so-called "Beat generation" had very little to do with what quickly became known as the East Village. People who found their way there were already--for various reasons--headed into the newly emerging networks of alternative media, a diverse politics of liberation, and the arts.

These people, some more aware of it than others, were "the Sixties." Alea, the original Little Miss Can't Be Wrong granted them gifts withheld from other generations. They were to have a double dose of power: the precocity to seize the time and shape that decade, and the opportunity, now, to define the terms of the approaching fin-de-siecle. This last, of course, comes at the expense of millions of young people that American society consigned to a dizzy and vicious illiteracy during the 1980s. It took a dozen years to do it, but there are neighborhoods in what was once "the richest nation on Earth" that bear an all-too-alarming resemblance to Mogadishu.