The only people who live in Brooklyn are people who can't afford the East Village.
I went to this tattoo parlor in the East Village and I got an outline of a violin on my lower back. They call them tramp stamps now.
I remember being unemployed and walking the East Village streets for many years, constantly checking my voice mail on pay phones, hoping for an audition.
I'm lucky to live in New York, a city that offers so many options for lunch. I can pick up dumplings from a Midtown food truck, grab empanadas by the dozen in Spanish Harlem or get a fantastic bowl of ramen in the East Village.
When I moved to the East Village in the late seventies, I wanted to be a street performer, so I practiced daily. I never did work up the skills or the courage to perform on the street, though.
I was a real East Village girl.
I rode with four street-clothes cops in the East Village. I spent six weeks riding with them every day - in street clothes, with a vest underneath.
I grew up in the East Village with a lot of old people in my building, and I'm not sure if they lost their sense of smell over the years, but they always seemed to smell like they poured a bottle of perfume on themselves. I never want to become that person.
So, we just kind of created our own thing and that's part of the beauty of Athens: is that it's so off the map and there's no way you could ever be the East Village or an L.A. scene or a San Francisco scene, that it just became its own thing.
When I'm in town on Sundays, I sometimes go down to the Central Bar in the East Village to watch English football. But my natural inclination now is to get in the car with my wife and kids and get out of town.
I live in the East Village, and occasionally people will recognize me there. When I'm in Williamsburg, I always get recognized. Midtown, not so much.
I like places where you can dance to crazy music, like Bedlam or Eastern Bloc in the East Village.
I've known the poet Eileen Myles since the 1990s, when I first moved to New York, and I remember seeing her walking her Pit Bull Rosie around the East Village. She had these beautiful arms and David Cassidy hair and the sort of swagger so many of the gay boys I knew wished we had. We all had crushes on her.
I remember going to the East Village for the first time as a fifteen-year-old and going to Tompkins Square Park. That really seemed like a pretty edgy thing to do.
The East Village is where I cut my teeth as a kid. I ran around here on a skateboard.
I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if that's what you'd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.
I don't see a lot of movies that portray the East Village as well as I think they can.
I'd spent my first 12 years in New York in an East Village walk-up. The upstairs neighbor was the cowboy from the Village People.
I grew up in a quiet suburb in South Texas, and loved the in-your-faceness of the East Village. In the early days, when I was still unemployed, I'd lie on a bench in Tompkins Square Park perusing the listings in the 'Village Voice' for a place to live.
I grew up in the East Village, in Alphabet City, when it was a very dangerous neighborhood. To survive there, I had to learn to be a little bit invisible.
