The East Village is the downtown that refused to be tidied — the punk clubs and poetry readings are mostly ghosts now, but the strangeness left a residue in the gardens, the saloons, and the worn three blocks of St Marks Place.
Start at the Astor Place cube — push it if there's a crowd; it spins — and head east down St Marks, which has been the punk strip and the head-shop strip and is now tattoo parlours and cheap food, layered and frayed. Step into McSorley's, working since the 1850s, sawdust on the floor and two kinds of ale; you don't have to drink to look. Then on to Tompkins Square Park, the neighbourhood's battleground turned living room, leafy and full of dogs.
East of the park the avenues go A to D, and the community gardens appear mid-block — patches the residents took back from the rubble in the seventies. End on the Bowery, the old skid row now hung with galleries and the white stacked boxes of the New Museum, with the F at 2 Av a short walk on.
