Private redevelopment and the changing forms of displacement in the east village of New York

The chaos that once characterized street life on a stretch of Avenue C in New York’s East Village is now muted. The unlicensed elderly Latino street vendors of household goods-from black-and-white televisions to kitchen utensils-have moved on; the heckling of the more desperate drug users by teenagers seems less frequent; the graffiti-scarred bricks of a five-story apartment building have been painted over, and all the units inside have been renovated by its latest private developer. Finally, the torched shells of three five-story tenements have been reconstructed under a community-sponsored alternative housing plan and are once again occupied by low and middle-income tenants. Although this description depicts a harmonious image of a mixed land-use neighborhood, it conceals more than a decade of controversy and struggle between private developers, the state, and residents over residential displacement and the gentrification of what was once one of the few remaining low-rent districts in Lower Manhattan, the East Village. In July of 1986, the sixteen-story landmark Christodora House, located one block west of Avenue C, reopened with its units newly renovated as luxury condominiums. It was a momentous occasion in East Village history for at least two sets of important local actors. For developers, it was the plunder of a hard-fought battle to bring the neighborhood into the fold of the 1980s Manhattan housing market of expensive luxury units. The prize was significant. Located in the heart of the “untamed” East Village on the east side of Tompkins Square Park, the Christodora’s many past uses read like a larger history of the Lower East Side. It was constructed in 1928 as a settlement house, left vacant for most of the 1940s and 1950s, partially let out to the Black Panthers in the 1960s, sold by the city to a real estate developer in 1975, and resold (flipped) twice before finally being renovated (Gordon, 1994). For the most optimistic of the city’s real estate community, the Christodora was the flagship for their efforts to displace the low-income image of the East Village (Real Estate Newsletter, 1985).