Lower East Side, New York City

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Are you a Led Zeppelin fan, A metalhead or a rocker? Well if your in Ny there is one place you got to Visit.

That is the Physical Grafiti Building located 96 Saint Mark's Place (just off 1st Ave)

When your standing outside the building Your standing in Rock & roll history.

You got to take a photo of this building. Its not a tourist attraction. Its a legacy of Metal in 1 apartment building

Built in 1832, the Merchant’s House is New York City’s only 19th-century home preserved intact, with original family furnishings and personal belongings.

It's an elegant red-brick and white-marble row house and shows how a prosperous merchant family and their four Irish servants lived from 1835 to 1865.

They have self-guided tours, guided tours for adult and student groups, and special programs and ehibitions.

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I went looking for Ken Weaver and Tuli Kupferberg 's "Nova Slum Goddess" walking south after a pastrami sandwich @ Katz.

Still a great neighborhood, LES has a few what I would call "street people" (not homeless, just colorful w/ some character & edge).
But if you're looking for tenements, you'd better have lots of knowhow & patience. As a naive tourist I found none, only the museum.

Lots of blocks are really cleaned up now w/ galleries & shops, but some local color survives.
Not all the rock clubs have expatriated to Williamsburg.

151 on Rivington is a funky rock bar.
Here's an article on the surviving LES & East Village rock scene:
Rock still lives

Here's a virtual (with audio) tour of a Lower East Side tenement @ 97 Orchard St:
'the Tenement'

An article about the slow death of lower Manhattan "legacy" renters:

Tenant-Landlord Wars

and an excellent documentary about gentrification's effect on the Bowery:
Bowery Dish
All the poets want to be with her, (Sherry)
Dionysus wants to dance with her, (Sherry)
All the pacifists want to love her, (Sherry)
(ooo Sherry Sherry Sherry ... - ooo Sherry Sherry Sherry)
She walks through the park, all the hippy hearts melt
Her skirt's not much wider than a garrison belt

Slum Goddess from the lower East Side
Slum Goddess won't you please be my bride
copyright, the FUGs

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The East Village is one of my favorite areas (though lately imo incredibly gentrified) and I really like the neighborhood by Tompkins Square Park and St Marks Place

Tompkins Sq. Park has 10 & 1/2 acres of excellent gardens, dog runs, fountain & walking paths, skaters, and people-watching.

Community events happening here often,
everything from Wigstock / HOWL Festival to the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival.

Just watching the dogs play with each other & their owners in the dog run was worth the visit for me.

This area and the whole East Village is one great historic neighborhood that feels good to walk, not to mention some excellent little places to eat and party.

How about a walking tour of one of the neighborhoods in New York City?

I just took the Gangsters: Birth of Organized Crime tour in the Lower East Side.

Our guide, Eric Ferrara, the Executive Director of the Lower East Side History Project and a New York native of the neighborhood, described the rivalries among the various "families," the tough living conditions in the 1800s and the colorful characters and their sometimes colorful demise. You'll even get a peek at the notorious motorcycle gang's Hell's Angels' NY headquarters!

You really get a flavor of what New York used to be in the 1800s and later.

You can buy his book (see cover art below) "A Guide to Gangsters, Murderers and Weirdos of New York City's Lower East Side" as a souvenier.

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Once the headquarters of the Bowery Savings Bank, this 1893 grand Neoclassical edifice is now a banquet hall known as "Capitale" and is listed as a historic landmark. It was the work of Stanford White, the same architect who designed the Memorial Arch in Washington Square Park. The building has two façades, one overlooking the Bowery and the other on Grand Street. In 1923, the Bowery Savings Bank moved its headquarters to East 42nd St, but this building remained a branch of the bank through its several mergers and acquisitions until the bank left it in recent times. After an extensive renovation, the building reopened in 2002 as Capitale, whose impressive interior, lavish decorations and extremely high ceilings make any event held here memorable. I was fortunate to attend a private event at Capitale in 2003.

Modelled after Château architecture of the Loire Valley in France, this magnificent edifice was nothing but a fire station. It was designed for the Engine Company No. 31 by the architect, Napoleon Lebrun, who later also designed the Metropolitan Life Tower on Madison Square Park. The building was completed in 1895 and served as a fire station until 1972. Nowadays it is occupied by a local television station and is unfortunately not open to the public. In 1972, the building was listed as a national landmark.

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Built in 1887 by Orthodox Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, the Eldridge Street Synagogue is a beautiful example of Moorish-revival architecture, with a touch of Gothic. It is located in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a neighbourhood that once had a high concentration of recent Jewish immigrants, most of whom were poor and lived in tenements. By the 1930s, much of the community moved elsewhere, thus diminishing the use of the synagogue. In 1950, the building was in a such a bad shape that the synagogue had to shut down and slide further into decay. A project to restore the ruined synagogue began in the late '80s and was not completed until 2007. It is now restored to its former glory and has reopened both as a synagogue and a museum. It is necessary to take a guided tour if one wants to visit the interior. Nowadays, the area immediately surrounding the Synagogue has been taken over by recent Chinese immigrants and their businesses, quite a contrast with the Synagogue.