Since the first tenements had gone up in the 1830s, the area had been home to virtually every wave of immigrants to hit these shores. On the Lower East Side in those days, there were plenty of takers. It taught arts and crafts and offered classes in English. In 1898, two young women, Christine MacColl and Sara Libby Carson, launched a nondenominational settlement house at 147 Avenue B and called it Christodora House. And meanwhile, a huge, unusual building surrounded by crime, decay, and poverty keeps changing hands for millions of dollars. Even the “Big Vinny” memorial, an abandoned structure on East 3rd Street that the Hells Angels have dedicated to a fallen comrade, is rumored to be going co-op. Two-bedroom apartments in ex-tenements rent for up to $2,000 a month. Diners at Evelyne’s sample French delicacies just a block from the men’s shelter, where homeless alcoholics sprawl on the sidewalks. Art collectors interrupt their scouting to make sure the hubcaps haven’t been swiped from the Mercedes. The owners of a bar called Beulah Land display works by graffiti artists, yet they worry about kids spray-painting the exterior of their place. There is unquestionably a certain madness to what’s going on. The young kids who just moved in upstairs and pay $700 a month for the same amount of space - they live in the East Village.” “I’ve lived in my rent-controlled apartment for years and pay $115 a month,” says one man. Some people who have lived there for years are understandably unhappy, particularly many of the shopkeepers who are unprotected by rent control. From newcomers like Harry Skydell to old hands like Harry Helmsley, developers are sweeping in, looking to make deals. Boutiques and charcuteries are offering things never seen before on these mean streets. More likely, they’re attached to art collectors who’ve just jetted in from Europe, for this old neighborhood has suddenly turned chic. Most of the accents heard in the East Village these days don’t belong to immigrants. The East Village refers to an area between Houston and 14th Streets, bounded by the Bowery and the East River - roughly the northern part of the Lower East Side. Today, the poverty and decay notwithstanding, it remains an extraordinary conglomeration of ethnic groups - principally Poles, Ukrainians, Chinese, and Puerto Ricans - and several generations of bohemians. Ranging from about 14th Street to Chinatown, it’s the neighborhood where immigrants have settled for 150 years. The Lower East Side is the historic New York melting pot. But nowhere have the tensions and dramas of this phenomenon been more starkly displayed than in the area known variously as the Lower East Side and the East Village.Īctually, the Lower East Side and the East Village are two distinct, though overlapping, communities, separated by class, history, and style. Spurred by an epic shortage in rental housing, tens of thousands of young, middle-class professionals have moved into and spruced up sagging neighborhoods - Park Slope, Chelsea, the Upper West Side, SoHo. Gentrification is a familiar story in New York City. And 26-year-old Harry Skydell, a lawyer with all of four months’ experience in real estate, was making plans to fix up a 55-year-old building that looked as decrepit as the neighborhood it towered over. Within hours, Jaffee was on a beach in Acapulco, reflecting on his 2,000 percent profit. Skydell agreed to virtually all of Jaffee’s conditions - including a $1.3-million price tag. At one in the morning, the deal was finally set. He was flying out early the next morning on a Mexican vacation. “We’ve got to settle tonight,” Skydell insisted. He was the only one who made an offer.Īnd yet, eight years later, Harry Skydell was keeping Jaffee up late at night, trying to work out a deal. Jaffee, a 51-year-old specialist in subsidized low-income housing, had finally bought it in 1975, after the minimum bid had dropped to $62,500. Early in the seventies, the city had put the Christodora up for auction and nobody bid. Even the exterior trim was starting to crumble. The electrical system was almost nonexistent the plumbing didn’t work. It was boarded up, ripped out, and flooded. The sixteen-story building he wanted to buy, on Avenue B facing Tompkins Square Park, was surrounded by burned-out buildings that crawled with pushers and junkies. Skydell’s enthusiasm was indeed mysterious. “He was like a little kid begging for his first lollipop,” recalls Jaffee. The developer had insisted on difficult conditions, and still Skydell kept running out to huddle with his partner, trying to find a way to buy it. A young man named Harry Skydell was wildly eager to buy the Christodora, a clunky old Lower East Side building that Jaffee owned. For reasons that he couldn’t quite fathom, he was in a terrific position. The talks dragged on past midnight, but George Jaffee, a Brooklyn real-estate developer, refused to budge.
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