Overview

ABOUT THE BOOK Through much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Manhattan below 14th Street was a great cultural brain that dreamed up a fantastic wealth of art and entertainment for the rest of the world. Greenwich Village was one hemisphere, the Lower East Side the other. Across all media and genres, from the loftiest avant-garde to low amusements for the masses, this dream machine changed world culture over and over again. On the Lower East Side, immigrants from around the world mingled with one another, and with artists, writers, musicians and other culture producers. The neighborhood also attracted rebels, eccentrics, visionaries, and refugees from the straight and normal life. Offbeats is a gallery of some great characters from the Lower East Side, a representative handful of visionaries, artists, misfits and criminals. They include Mickey the Pope, who invented an illegal and ingenious pot delivery service; street gang leader-turned-artist Cochise; pioneers of the movie industry, who went from running nickelodeons on the Lower East Side to building Hollywood empires; Father Pat Maloney, an Irish priest jailed for his role in a Brinks heist to help fund the IRA; Baba Raul Canizares, a Santeria priest; Boris Lurie, a concentration camp survivor who cofounded the NO!art movement; mystic and poet Lionel Ziprin; Yiddish theater star Molly Picon; as well as drag artists, street artists, and other creators. Gentrification has ended the Lower East Side that nurtured and attracted these Offbeats. All the more reason to remember and celebrate them through the marvelous stories and photographs in this book.

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9781887276986

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ABOUT THE BOOK Through much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Manhattan below 14th Street was a great cultural brain that dreamed up a fantastic wealth of art and entertainment for the rest of the world. Greenwich Village was one hemisphere, the Lower East Side the other. Across all media and genres, from the loftiest avant-garde to low amusements for the masses, this dream machine changed world culture over and over again. On the Lower East Side, immigrants from around the world mingled with one another, and with artists, writers, musicians and other culture producers. The neighborhood also attracted rebels, eccentrics, visionaries, and refugees from the straight and normal life. Offbeats is a gallery of some great characters from the Lower East Side, a representative handful of visionaries, artists, misfits and criminals. They include Mickey the Pope, who invented an illegal and ingenious pot delivery service; street gang leader-turned-artist Cochise; pioneers of the movie industry, who went from running nickelodeons on the Lower East Side to building Hollywood empires; Father Pat Maloney, an Irish priest jailed for his role in a Brinks heist to help fund the IRA; Baba Raul Canizares, a Santeria priest; Boris Lurie, a concentration camp survivor who cofounded the NO!art movement; mystic and poet Lionel Ziprin; Yiddish theater star Molly Picon; as well as drag artists, street artists, and other creators. Gentrification has ended the Lower East Side that nurtured and attracted these Offbeats. All the more reason to remember and celebrate them through the marvelous stories and photographs in this book.

ABOUT THE BOOK Through much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Manhattan below 14th Street was a great cultural brain that dreamed up a fantastic wealth of art and entertainment for the rest of the world. Greenwich Village was one hemisphere, the Lower East Side the other. Across all media and genres, from the loftiest avant-garde to low amusements for the masses, this dream machine changed world culture over and over again. On the Lower East Side, immigrants from around the world mingled with one another, and with artists, writers, musicians and other culture producers. The neighborhood also attracted rebels, eccentrics, visionaries, and refugees from the straight and normal life. Offbeats is a gallery of some great characters from the Lower East Side, a representative handful of visionaries, artists, misfits and criminals. They include Mickey the Pope, who invented an illegal and ingenious pot delivery service; street gang leader-turned-artist Cochise; pioneers of the movie industry, who went from running nickelodeons on the Lower East Side to building Hollywood empires; Father Pat Maloney, an Irish priest jailed for his role in a Brinks heist to help fund the IRA; Baba Raul Canizares, a Santeria priest; Boris Lurie, a concentration camp survivor who cofounded the NO!art movement; mystic and poet Lionel Ziprin; Yiddish theater star Molly Picon; as well as drag artists, street artists, and other creators. Gentrification has ended the Lower East Side that nurtured and attracted these Offbeats. All the more reason to remember and celebrate them through the marvelous stories and photographs in this book.

Author Information

Clayton Patterson and his wife Elsa Rensaa came to New York City from Canada in 1979. In 1983 they bought a small storefront building on the Lower East Side, and began to document the history, social life, and politics of the neighborhood. Walking the streets of the neighborhood opened an amazing body of photography. Over the years they developed probably the largest inner-city archive in America, hundreds of thousands of photos, plus videos and street ephemera. In 1988 they made a video that became known as the Tompkins Square Park Police Riot tape. It was the first time a handheld, commercially available video camera was used to hold police accountable. Clayton has also edited and published a number of books on Lower East Side history, culture and politics, including Captured: A Film & Video History of the Lower East Side; Resistance: A Radical Social and Political History of the Lower East Side; and the three-volume Jews: A People's History of the Lower East Side. In 1986 Clayton and Elsa turned their storefront into the Clayton Gallery & Outlaw Art Museum, which has shown a galaxy of artists overlooked by the standard art world hype. Since 2013 he has organized the annual Acker Awards to pay tribute to such artists and the community members who support them. The filmmakers Dan Levin and Ben Solomon made a documentary feature about Clayton and Elsa, Captured, released in 2008. They've also been portrayed in graphic novel style in the book Clayton: Godfather of Lower East Side Documentary, edited by Julian Voloj, with work by eighteen artists, published in 2020. John Strausbaugh has been writing about New York City history and culture for more than thirty years. From 1988 through 2002 he edited and wrote for the weekly newspaper New York Press. In 2007/8 he wrote and hosted the Weekend Explorer series of neighborhood articles and videos for the New York Times. He has also written for the Washington Post, the Wilson Quarterly, Evergreen Review, the National Review, The Chiseler, and other publications. He has written a number of highly regarded books, including Black Like You, a history of blackface; Rock 'Til You Drop; and three books of New York City history: The Village, City of Sedition, and Victory City. He lived at Suffolk and Delancey Streets for a few years in the early 1990s, and has also lived in the Village, Hell's Kitchen, the Flatiron district, and now Brooklyn Heights.

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