Historical Reenactors Return To East Village For Summer Tourism Season

For in ye olde timey times, the locals once hoisted placards railing against “yuppie scum”:

Among the seasonal developments that signal the approach of summer in New York City are the ascent of lifeguards into wooden chairs on Rockaway Beach, the appearance of seersucker suits in Madison Avenue store windows and the formation of long waiting lines for tickets to Shakespeare in the Park.

But in the East Village, where people commonly sunbathe on tar-paper roofs, black leather is in season year-round and the street theater is always free, the calendar change is observed in other ways, with soap box speak-outs, self-organized street demonstrations and parades — usually against gentrification and its perceived agents.

And so it was that Friday night signified the opening of the East Village summer social season as 100 people gathered on East First Street to protest what they said was the sterilization and overdevelopment of the Bowery and the nearby streets, once one of the seedier districts in the city.

“This is the biggest crowd I’ve seen in a while,” said Jerry Wade, a veteran of many East Village demonstrations. “We used to have things like this all the time.”

John Penley, a local photographer, organized the event and advertised it as a “protest march against real estate developers, landlords, yuppie wine bars and Republicans.”

The starting point was the Bowery Wine Company, a sleek bar partly owned by Bruce Willis, which has been a meeting place for a Republican club. It stands just a few hundred feet from where CBGB, the renowned punk rock club, operated for 33 years before closing in 2006 after a dispute with its landlord.

The wine bar opened in March inside the recently built Avalon Bowery development, which takes up almost an entire block, including the former site of an abandoned schoolhouse that was used for years as a studio by monks who practiced martial arts. Later, squatters stayed there, referring to it as the Kung Fu Castle.