Once upon a time...

Once upon a time, some of us would gather at the Sheridan Square newstand (when there were still such things) and wait in the early morning hours for the drop off of that week's Village Voice. In those days, apartments would go for under a hundred dollars, sometimes well under, and you could easily pick up a new life where the old one left off.
     Usually a fresh coat of landlord-supplied paint would cover up the fact that you were in some way indigent and living marginally.  Then, as you began to settle in and get your bearings, you would accommodate yourself to the toilet in the hallway and the bathtub in the kitchen.  Life wasn't so bad.  After all, you had your autonomy.  You were free; you didn't need to grovel in the marketplace of money and show yourself off with the results.
     Sometimes the relocation to The Lower East Side, aka East Village, was to meet up with friends and associates already in residence.  Other times, it was to connect to the electrical currents always surging around discoveries in the arts and unending experiments in new ways of living.  It was in the '60s and through my associations at City College that I first discovered the East Village.  My mother had warned me against 'the commies', but I soon found my way to the radicalism of the south campus cafeteria and that was when my life began in earnest.  I eventually found my way to the New York Federation of Anarchists and would journey from my parents in the East '80s to dinners on streets numbered in single digits.  I remember distinctly macrobiotic meals with grain so stalwart that I would have an entirely unexpected bowel movement the next morning.  Also, for the first time, a woman with an eye catching ankle length skirt who did artist's modeling.  Who ever heard of such things.  Too, a copy of the East Village Eye caught my attention, the first ever of the underground press.
     Transitioning through the sixties brought me into the turbulence of the revolutionary antiwar movement and the beginnings of women's liberation.  The East Village became a vortex of a global paroxysm of what could be, rather than the tired remains of what had always been in place.  Now I am a homesteader away from the megalopolis of New York City, with the lingering memory of what has now receded into the past.  The East Village went from the hallucinogenic floral explosion of the sixties into '70s New Wave, leaving in its wake a residue of gentrification and a brief proliferation of galleries in the '80s.  In one of the last visits I made, I was astonished that this excitement had relocated to an outer borough.  Despite geographic dislocations, the diaspora of risk-takers will never spend itself to a conclusion.