By Jerome Rothenberg. Contributions by Steven Clay, Rodney Phillips.

By Jerome Rothenberg. Contributions by Steven Clay, Rodney Phillips.

After being kicked out of her apartment in Brooklyn in 1992, and unable to afford rent anywhere near her school, young art student Ash Thayer found herself with few options. Luckily she was welcomed as a guest into See Skwat. New York City in the '90s saw the streets of the Lower East Side overun with derelict buildings, junkies huddled in dark corners, and dealers packing guns. People in desperate need of housing, worn down from waiting for years in line on the low-income housing lists, had been moving in and fixing up city-abandoned buildings since the mid-80s in the LES. Squatters took over entire buildings, but these structures were barely habitable. They were overrun with vermin, lacking plumbing, electricity, and even walls, floors, and a roof. Punks and outcasts joined the squatter movement and tackled an epic rebuilding project to create homes for themselves. The squatters were forced to be secretive and exclusive as a result of their poor legal standing in the buildings. Few outsiders were welcome and fewer photographers or journalists. Thayer's camera accompanied her everywhere as she lived at the squats and worked alongside other residents. Ash observed them training each other in these necessary crafts and finding much of their materials in the overflowing bounty that is New York City's refuse and trash. The trust earned from her subjects was unique and her access intimate. Kill City is a true untold story of New York's legendary LES squatters.

This landmark book, together with its accompanying CD, captures the heady excitement of the vibrant, irreverent poetry scene of New York's Lower East Side in the 1960s. Drawing from personal interviews with many of the participants, from unpublished letters, and from rare sound recordings, Daniel Kane brings together for the first time the people, political events, and poetic roots that coalesced into a highly influential community. From the poetry-reading venues of the early sixties, such as those at the Les Deux Mégots and Le Metro coffeehouses to The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, a vital forum for poets to this day, Kane traces the history of this literary renaissance, showing how it was born from a culture of publicly performed poetry. The Lower East Side in the sixties proved foundational in American verse culture, a defining era for the artistic and political avant-garde. The voices and works of John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Charles Bernstein, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Kenneth Koch, Bernadette Mayer, Ron Padgett, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, Frank O'Hara, and many others enliven these pages, and the thirty five-track CD includes recordings of several of the poets reading from their work in the sixties and seventies. The Lower East Side's cafes, coffeehouses, and salons brought together poets of various aesthetic sensibilities, including writers associated with the so-called New York School, Beats, Black Mountain, Deep Image, San Francisco Renaissance, Umbra, and others. Kane shows that the significance for literary history of this loosely defined community of poets and artists lies in part in its reclaiming an orally centered poetic tradition, adapted specifically to open up the possibilities for an aesthetically daring, playful poetics and a politics of joy and resistance.

Despite its innumerable tourist attractions, New York City still has many secrets, hidden in the most unlikely places. There is the Edison Hotel in Times Square, where magicians gather 'round the Magic Table to socialize and compete. There is Hua Mei Garden in the Lower East Side, where elderly Chinese men meet to display exotic birds. And there is Sahadi's in Brooklyn, where the culinary arts thrive, and New Yorkers go for just the right ingredients for a Middle Eastern meal. This book details thirty-two unusual locations such as these and enhances them by including a cluster of additional, related spots. Hidden New York shows you why these places matter and guides you through the historical and cultural significance of each one. Many of them matter because of the opportunities they provide for socializing, such as the Empire Roller Disco in Brooklyn that attracts a community of skaters and the Cube sculpture on Astor Place, which is a meeting spot for homeless youth. Others matter because they are focal points for communities and the spaces are intertwined with how people share in each others' lives. Still others have been lost, like the house under the roller coaster in Coney Island, made famous by Woody Allen in Annie Hall. This book is not just about Manhattan, but covers all five boroughs in New York City. It is an invitation to visit, revisit, learn, and enjoy all that you didn't know the city has to offer. It will show you what's there, what used to be there, and why it will be there for years to come. The chapters, illustrated with appealing black-and-white photos, include first-person remembrances and commentaries from New Yorkers themselves. Each entry functions as a small travel essay, evoking how certain destinations are experienced. As a guide to the New York City that is less traveled, this unique book shows that some of the best places to visit are ones that you never even thought existed. The 32 Places That Matter Hua Mei Bird Garden Russian and Turkish Tenth Street Baths Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden The Magic Table at the Edison Hotel The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesman Webster Hall The Cube Stickball Boulevard and the Stadiums of the Street Thomas Jefferson Park Pool Empire Roller Skating Center Chess Havens Coney Island The Lemon Ice King of Corona Coney Island Bialys and Bagels Sahadi's Specialty and Middle Eastern Foods Arthur Avenue Market Union Square Greenmarket The Village Vanguard Casa Amadeo Record Shop Richmond Barthé's Frieze at Kingsborough Houses Quirky Features of the Landscape Art in the Subways Governors Island Casita Rincón Criollo, Magnolia Tree Earth Center, Liz Christy Bowery-Houston Community Garden The Flower District Fishing around New York Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and Museum Masjid Al-Taqwa Ganesha Hindu Temple Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto The Memorials of the Battery Strawberry Fields

An irreverent, hilarious, illustrated history of social revolution in New York's East Village in the sixties, as told by poet, publisher, musician, and Peace Eye Bookstore owner Sanders.

An intimate and moving portrait of daily life in New York's oldest institution of traditional rabbinic learning New York City's Lower East Side has witnessed a severe decline in its Jewish population in recent decades, yet every morning in the big room of the city's oldest yeshiva, students still gather to study the Talmud beneath the great arched windows facing out onto East Broadway. Yeshiva Days is Jonathan Boyarin's uniquely personal account of the year he spent as both student and observer at Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem, and a poignant chronicle of a side of Jewish life that outsiders rarely see. Boyarin explores the yeshiva's relationship with the neighborhood, the city, and Jewish and American culture more broadly, and brings vividly to life its routines, rituals, and rhythms. He describes the compelling and often colorful personalities he encounters each day, and introduces readers to the Rosh Yeshiva, or Rebbi, the moral and intellectual head of the yeshiva. Boyarin reflects on the tantalizing meanings of "study for its own sake" in the intellectually vibrant world of traditional rabbinic learning, and records his fellow students' responses to his negotiation of the daily complexities of yeshiva life while he also conducts anthropological fieldwork. A richly mature work by a writer of uncommon insight, wit, and honesty, Yeshiva Days is the story of a place on the Lower East Side with its own distinctive heritage and character, a meditation on the enduring power of Jewish tradition and learning, and a record of a different way of engaging with time and otherness.