East Village is a neighborhood bounded by 14th Street on the north, the East River on the east, Houston Street on the south, and, roughly, Broadway on the west. It lies east of Greenwich Village and NoHo, south of Stuyvesant Town, and north of the Lower East Side. The East Village includes the area known as Alphabet City.
Until the 1960s, the eastern side of Manhattan between 14th and Houston Streets was simply the north side of the Lower East Side, and shared much of its immigrant, working class characteristics with the area below Houston Street. A shift began in the 1950s with the migration of Beatniks into the neighborhood, and then hippies, musicians and artists in the 1960s. The area was dubbed the "East Village", to dissociate it from the image of slums evoked by the Lower East Side name, and to present the area as the new Greenwich Village, which had been popular with artists, but had become stodgy and middle-class by then.
