For all the years I lived in the East Village, the Yiddish Art Theater, a building on 2nd Ave and 12th street with a bold and controversial history in the East Village was boarded up. Now it has been reopened as the Village East Cinema. The building is considered to be Romanesque Revival in style or also referred to as Queen Anne.
Second Avenue in New York was often called the Yiddish Tin Pan Alley and was considered a mecca for Jewish intellectuals and artists. This January marked the finale curtain for an era in the East Village when, regrettably, the Second Avenue Deli closed after a lease dispute between the landlord and the family heir Jeremy Lebewohl shut them down. The original founder Abe Lebewohl, a holocaust survivor was shot to death on March 4 1996 during a robbery. The Second Avenue Deli has confusingly reopened its doors in Murray Hill on East 33rd Street minus the Molly Picon Room and its walk of Yiddish stars.
During the 1980s it was often assumed that the Yiddish Art Theater had been the home of legend rock-and-roll promoter Bill Graham's Fillmore East, a venerate rock-and-roll institution during the 1960s but, in actuality, Fillmore was three blocks to the South on 2nd Ave. Along this gritty New York avenue, beneath 14th street and the origins of Park Avenue south lived a less luxurious working class immigrant Jewish cultural life where matzoh ball soup, corned beef, pastrami, knishes, gefilte fish, cholent and other notables of Jewish cuisine filled the gullet of working Jews who lied shoulder to shoulder with Beatniks (in the 50s) hippies (in the 60s) and eventually punk rockers and yuppies (in the 80s and 90s)
On one trip back to New York a few years ago, a friend commented that Williamsburg Brooklyn was the new East Village. Maybe that's not fair to Williamburg and with the history of the East Village it is not fair to 2nd Avenue, its rich cultural traditions and history of the 20th century.
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