The numbered streets are lined with walk up tenements, and Tompkins Square Park sits in the middle of them.
What the East Village looks like
Most of the numbered streets east of are lined with walk up tenements, five and six stories, with the fire escapes on the fronts rather than the backs. The lots are about twenty five feet wide, so the buildings are too.
By the middle of the nineteenth century this was part of Little Germany. It held the third largest urban German population outside Vienna and Berlin, and the tenements were built for it. A law passed in 1879 required a window in every room, which is why the buildings from then on have air shafts down their sides. The state changed the rules again in 1901.
The city designated two historic districts here in 2012. The smaller one covers the block of that faces . The larger one is centered on lower Second Avenue.
The park itself is ten and a half acres, running from Avenue A across to Avenue B and from East 7th Street up to . It opened in 1834. The lettered avenues from A to D give its name.
One corner of the neighborhood is older than any of that. was laid out before the grid and runs true east and west, while everything around it sits 28.9 degrees off. stands at its eastern end, finished in 1799 on the site of Peter Stuyvesant's family chapel. A fire nearly destroyed it in 1978 and the rebuilding was finished in 1986.
Films shot in the East Village
Two blocks of the East Village appear in The Godfather Part II.
The two blocks are a street apart
and the corner at Avenue B and East 7th Street are one block from each other, and the production used both.
The Godfather Part II, 1974
The Little Italy of young Vito's arrival was shot on between Avenue A and Avenue B. The production dressed the whole block back to 1917. Carole Teller photographed the shoot from the sidewalk. Her pictures name the buildings, 519 to 531 on one side and 520 to 530 on the other.
The Godfather Part II, 1974
The bar where the Rosato brothers try to garrotte Frank Pentangeli was PH Vazac's at 108 Avenue B, on the corner of East 7th Street at the southeast corner of . The shootout that follows was filmed outside on East 7th Street. The bar is still open as 7B.
What the East Village can double for
the East Village can stand in for Little Italy in the 1910s, downtown New York in the 1970s and 1980s and a Lower East Side tenement block.
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