Two tragedies, beatniks led by Allen Ginsberg, the first macrobiotic restaurant with Yoko Ono as a waitress, or perhaps hippies and the “Edison of the Internet”. At first glance, an inconspicuous New York house in the East Village district of Manhattan keeps a number of extraordinary memories within its walls. They were researched by American journalism professor David Hajdu, who even composed a song cycle about the building.
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New York’s inconspicuous house in the East Village has experienced several extraordinary lives | Video: Michaela Lišková
As you walk through New York’s Manhattan, each neighborhood breathes a completely different atmosphere. Around Wall Street, between the giant modern glass skyscrapers and the formally dressed people passing by, the stress of work and the general hustle and bustle of the modern age falls on one. On the contrary, for example, from a number of picturesque, low houses with modified entrances in Greenwich Village, you can feel inner peace and an escape from the big city.
But the East Village district, located in the southwest of Manhattan, does not appear unambiguous. Perhaps also thanks to its history, it evokes a mixture of various feelings. The streets are mostly characterized by typical New York brick houses with black fire escapes, known mostly from American movies and TV series. Between them alternate bars and cafes of different styles, grocery stores, vintage clothes, antique shops, fast food, alternative theater scenes and even the torso of a neo-Gothic church from the end of the 19th century.
Almost all the buildings in this diverse neighborhood hide different historical destinies within their walls. At first glance, the completely inconspicuous four-story house, which fits in among the other buildings on East Seventh Street with the descriptive number 64, has experienced several extraordinary lives.
The house became an obsession
David Hajdu, a writer and professor of journalism at New York’s elite Columbia University, came across the building five years ago. The house on East Seventh Street became more than a curiosity to him. He became obsessed with him. “He had me under control,” he told The New York Times in his university office, adding that he became interested in the history of buildings in the East Village when he learned that his favorite bar, where he went to listen to jazz as a student, had been turned into a business , where board games were played. “I was thinking about the dynamic between the material immutability of houses and cultural change, and how one building can live multiple lives when adapted to the purposes of multiple time periods,” he described to Columbia News.
After exploring houses in the East Village district, the writer was most interested in the house with the descriptive number 64. So much so that he wrote about it the song cycle The Parsonage, which contains eight songs about eight stories by eight different composers.
Although today the house looks inconspicuous, even uninteresting, it hides several secrets. The building, built around 1840, is associated with two tragedies. In 1904, pastor George Haas organized a steamboat trip for his mostly German congregation at this location. The PS General Slocum, bound for Long Island, was sailing up the East River when it caught fire, killing nearly all 1,300 parishioners and crew. The choir trip thus became the deadliest event in New York, surpassed only by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Russian magazine, beatniks and hippies
At the beginning of the 20th century, when the neighborhood was filled with immigrants from Eastern Europe, the pro-communist weekly Russian Voice, published by Alexander Braylovsky, was published on the ground floor of the building. On September 18, 1920, the police came to the house and arrested the publisher on suspicion of involvement in the terrorist attack on Wall Street, in which 30 people died and 200 were injured. But Brailovsky was eventually released and the crime was never solved.
In the 1950s, the house entered psychedelic history. The Cart Wheel cafe was located on its premises, where a wide range of various drugs were sold. In addition to milder stimulants, capsules of the so-called Peyote, a natural hallucinogenic drug originating from the cactus, could also be found on site. 10 years later, bohemians and the beat generation started moving into the neighborhood because of the cheap rents. The place was thus transformed into the literary cafe Les Deux Mégots, where, for example, Allen Ginsberg read.
Two years later, the beatniks gave way to the hippie community, and the literary cafe became the first macrobiotic restaurant called Paradox (a restaurant based on the Taoist teachings of ying and yang, which does not use industrially processed food). The Japanese-American visual artist and musician, later wife of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, also served in it. “I liked working as a waitress in a macrobiotic restaurant. I even cooked a little there. People stood in line for my salad – it was very good,” the artist wrote on her Twitter in 2017.
The house was bought by “Edison Internet”, now it is for sale again
With the 1970s, a new drug arrived in the East Village. The hallucinogenic cactus peyote replaced heroin, which darkened the local atmosphere considerably for its users. Therefore, the owner sold the restaurant Paradox to the hippie community The Rainbow Family of Living Light.
With the arrival of the 90s, the house began to lose its mysterious charm. In the district, instead of art, fashion began to prevail, and the Tokyo 7 clothing store was established in the building. Then, due to gentrification, the neighborhood began to change in general, and in 2008, the house became a residence, where different families took turns. In 2019, Bill Joy, one of the co-founders of the technology company Sun Microsystems, whom Fortune magazine called the “Edison of the Internet,” bought the house for $15.75 million (about 3.4 billion crowns).
But now, an inconspicuous New York house from the transforming East Village district with an incredible history is once again looking for a new owner. The building with ten rooms and seven bathrooms of almost 700 m2 is for sale for 13.5 million dollars, i.e. 2.9 billion crowns.
