Re Write of First Major Test "Lower East Side"
Our first major test in ENG 088 was in reality a practice exam for our final at the end of the semster. The class had two options for the exam, one of the options was to write about a neighborhood that had changed since you first knew of it. I had an enormous amount of anxiety beforehand, this was precisely the test I failed two years ago. With my major problem in English being my handwriting, having to free write a handwritten essay is rather nerve racking. These same circumstances were enforced for this exam. Surprisingly enough I scored a perfect grade but being the perfectionist I am I re wrote it and the final draft is below, let me know what you think.
The Lower East Side of Manhattan has been a favorite haunt of musicians, poets, squatters, drug addicts and political activists for decades. Its streets have borne witness to the rise of several genres of music and art, and the fall of many lives as well. The LES started as a neighborhood of mostly working class Jews, Italians and other European immigrants. It was known for it’s seedier residents as well, due to the prevalence of missions and flophouses along the Bowery it was referred to as a slum. Nowadays the LES is a mishmash of cultures, ideologies, and beats. When I found and instantly fell in love with the LES, I was about 15 or so and the neighborhood was cheap, rundown and full of life.
Those days were full of Punk and politics, this made the LES a perfect match for me. Fringe leftist groups, handing out flyers and selling their respective causes, were a fixture in the neighborhood. Marxists however don’t make for very good salesmen. That distinction for me would go to the owners of the Mom and Pop record stores which proliferated the LES at the time. There were no major record store chains in the LES back then, this anomaly kept the independent record stores in business. Kids like me (teenagers who were starved for punk) flocked every weekend searching for the latest in punk and hardcore. When I think back on how much money I spent in these stores over those years, I do so without resentment. If those big record stores didn’t want us spending our money in their shops, we didn’t need them.
What made the shopping experience at the Mom and Pop stores so great was the time spent traveling from store to store. The streets were rife with artwork and political statements etched out in stencil or in some other rudimentary medium. My first real political science class was held in the streets of the LES.
Political science and Art weren’t the only classes taught in the LES. There were several other lessons one could learn just by walking its streets. The LES had (and has) its underbelly just like most neighborhoods, it just didn’t (or wouldn’t) hide it as well as most. A typical walk down its streets would reveal the last night’s party favors; bags of various sizes that contained drugs of varying efficacies littered the ground. Most of these bags, just hours earlier, contained Heroin. “Skag” or “Smack”, as it used to be called, started to take hold in the late 60s on through the 70s and never loosened it’s grip on the LES through the subsequent decades. It transcended trends; Heroin in the LES was always in.
Because of the proliferation of drugs and all that goes with it, the rents were relatively cheap. I still hear stories from long time residents about their parents paying $20-40 a week for a small apartment, those stories sound more like fairy tales now. The drug element (and its by products) made parts of the LES downright dangerous, there were parts of the East Village/LES that I would never think of going to anytime of day, let alone at night. It’s a shame really, from what I have heard there was a vibrant Puerto Rican community in this drug ravaged part of the LES. This area, named Loisaida by its majority Puerto Rican residents, played an important role in the history of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. The Loisaida area gave birth to the Nuyorican poets café, which was co-founded by legendary poet and playwright Miguel Piñero. Piñero was a living personification of the LES, a brilliant immigrant artist who was also a drug addict and at one point a petty thief.
I am 31 now and still a regular of the LES, though now my favorite haunts are bars rather than record stores. There are simply more bars to choose from than record stores to go to. Most of the independent record stores have closed due to the mushrooming of big chain record stores popping up everywhere along the borders of the neighborhood. It didn’t hurt that the chain stores, instead of just stocking top 40 albums, now offer music from every genre, from all over the world. This turn of events suits me just fine since my tastes have grown from the Dead Kennedys to Fela Kuti.
In my opinion the most noticeable change in the last few decades have been in its rent and its residents. Today’s denizens of the LES are not the sons and daughters of the Jews, Italians or Puerto Ricans of yesteryear. They are the graduates of New York’s fine universities such as Columbia and NYU. These current inhabitants as of yet don’t have much history in the LES, they would sooner have roots in Colorado than Clinton Street. The median income in the area has skyrockted and with it the rents. Why would a Landlord continue to rent a subsidized apartment to a Latino family when he or she could evict said family, renovate the property and be able to rent or even sell the apartment to the highest bidder. Some would say this effects all in the market for an apartment, from a lower income family to a young professional just out of college saddled with debt. While this is true the benefits of having to rely on public assistance and/or low wage employment pale in comparison to the luxury of having Mommy’s and Daddy’s trust fund to rely on in such a situation.
Everyone is in agreement that the LES has changed and most would say for the better. The reason is unanimous: the reduction of crime. Most people celebrate this decrease in felonious behavior but never think how or why this happened. Some people assume that the drugs are gone but this is simply not the case. The trend downward in crime happened almost at the same time as crack, weed and cheaper drugs (and the residents who could afford them) were on their way out, and cocaine, ecstasy and more expensive drugs (and the residents who could afford them) were on their way in. There is more of an urgency on the NYPD’s (and the country as a whole) part to prosecute drug offenders if they deal in crack cocaine rather than if they deal it’s powdered variant. One can see this fact illustrated in the sentences handed out to crack dealers in comparison to cocaine sellers. So instead of the aggressive policing of the early Guliani years we now have better relations between the police and the community. This means less arrests, less confrontation with police and simply put a better more tranquil neighborhood.
Sure nowadays the LES is safer with a lot of it’s grit gone. Its grit however, was what defined this neighborhood for so many generations. Despite this talk of gentrification the LES is still by far the most exciting neighborhood in the city, a neighborhood whose inhabitants still consist of immigrants, artists, drug addicts, musicians. The difference now is there are a lot more hipsters and yuppies who are just now beginning to write the pages of their history in the Lower East Side. Lets hope that those hipsters don’t erase the past.
The Lower East Side of Manhattan has been a favorite haunt of musicians, poets, squatters, drug addicts and political activists for decades. Its streets have borne witness to the rise of several genres of music and art, and the fall of many lives as well. The LES started as a neighborhood of mostly working class Jews, Italians and other European immigrants. It was known for it’s seedier residents as well, due to the prevalence of missions and flophouses along the Bowery it was referred to as a slum. Nowadays the LES is a mishmash of cultures, ideologies, and beats. When I found and instantly fell in love with the LES, I was about 15 or so and the neighborhood was cheap, rundown and full of life.
Those days were full of Punk and politics, this made the LES a perfect match for me. Fringe leftist groups, handing out flyers and selling their respective causes, were a fixture in the neighborhood. Marxists however don’t make for very good salesmen. That distinction for me would go to the owners of the Mom and Pop record stores which proliferated the LES at the time. There were no major record store chains in the LES back then, this anomaly kept the independent record stores in business. Kids like me (teenagers who were starved for punk) flocked every weekend searching for the latest in punk and hardcore. When I think back on how much money I spent in these stores over those years, I do so without resentment. If those big record stores didn’t want us spending our money in their shops, we didn’t need them.
What made the shopping experience at the Mom and Pop stores so great was the time spent traveling from store to store. The streets were rife with artwork and political statements etched out in stencil or in some other rudimentary medium. My first real political science class was held in the streets of the LES.
Political science and Art weren’t the only classes taught in the LES. There were several other lessons one could learn just by walking its streets. The LES had (and has) its underbelly just like most neighborhoods, it just didn’t (or wouldn’t) hide it as well as most. A typical walk down its streets would reveal the last night’s party favors; bags of various sizes that contained drugs of varying efficacies littered the ground. Most of these bags, just hours earlier, contained Heroin. “Skag” or “Smack”, as it used to be called, started to take hold in the late 60s on through the 70s and never loosened it’s grip on the LES through the subsequent decades. It transcended trends; Heroin in the LES was always in.
Because of the proliferation of drugs and all that goes with it, the rents were relatively cheap. I still hear stories from long time residents about their parents paying $20-40 a week for a small apartment, those stories sound more like fairy tales now. The drug element (and its by products) made parts of the LES downright dangerous, there were parts of the East Village/LES that I would never think of going to anytime of day, let alone at night. It’s a shame really, from what I have heard there was a vibrant Puerto Rican community in this drug ravaged part of the LES. This area, named Loisaida by its majority Puerto Rican residents, played an important role in the history of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. The Loisaida area gave birth to the Nuyorican poets café, which was co-founded by legendary poet and playwright Miguel Piñero. Piñero was a living personification of the LES, a brilliant immigrant artist who was also a drug addict and at one point a petty thief.
I am 31 now and still a regular of the LES, though now my favorite haunts are bars rather than record stores. There are simply more bars to choose from than record stores to go to. Most of the independent record stores have closed due to the mushrooming of big chain record stores popping up everywhere along the borders of the neighborhood. It didn’t hurt that the chain stores, instead of just stocking top 40 albums, now offer music from every genre, from all over the world. This turn of events suits me just fine since my tastes have grown from the Dead Kennedys to Fela Kuti.
In my opinion the most noticeable change in the last few decades have been in its rent and its residents. Today’s denizens of the LES are not the sons and daughters of the Jews, Italians or Puerto Ricans of yesteryear. They are the graduates of New York’s fine universities such as Columbia and NYU. These current inhabitants as of yet don’t have much history in the LES, they would sooner have roots in Colorado than Clinton Street. The median income in the area has skyrockted and with it the rents. Why would a Landlord continue to rent a subsidized apartment to a Latino family when he or she could evict said family, renovate the property and be able to rent or even sell the apartment to the highest bidder. Some would say this effects all in the market for an apartment, from a lower income family to a young professional just out of college saddled with debt. While this is true the benefits of having to rely on public assistance and/or low wage employment pale in comparison to the luxury of having Mommy’s and Daddy’s trust fund to rely on in such a situation.
Everyone is in agreement that the LES has changed and most would say for the better. The reason is unanimous: the reduction of crime. Most people celebrate this decrease in felonious behavior but never think how or why this happened. Some people assume that the drugs are gone but this is simply not the case. The trend downward in crime happened almost at the same time as crack, weed and cheaper drugs (and the residents who could afford them) were on their way out, and cocaine, ecstasy and more expensive drugs (and the residents who could afford them) were on their way in. There is more of an urgency on the NYPD’s (and the country as a whole) part to prosecute drug offenders if they deal in crack cocaine rather than if they deal it’s powdered variant. One can see this fact illustrated in the sentences handed out to crack dealers in comparison to cocaine sellers. So instead of the aggressive policing of the early Guliani years we now have better relations between the police and the community. This means less arrests, less confrontation with police and simply put a better more tranquil neighborhood.
Sure nowadays the LES is safer with a lot of it’s grit gone. Its grit however, was what defined this neighborhood for so many generations. Despite this talk of gentrification the LES is still by far the most exciting neighborhood in the city, a neighborhood whose inhabitants still consist of immigrants, artists, drug addicts, musicians. The difference now is there are a lot more hipsters and yuppies who are just now beginning to write the pages of their history in the Lower East Side. Lets hope that those hipsters don’t erase the past.
posted by djshoghi at
1:05 PM
