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“It just shows that parts of the city had always been gentrifying, but today it’s just happening so much faster.” In fact, it was so emblematic that New York Magazine featured it in its 1984 cover story, entitled “The Lower East Side: There Goes The Neighborhood.”įor Murphy, the 1984 cover story is eerily similar to the woes plaguing many of the city’s neighborhoods now. For many long-time neighborhood residents, the Christadora was an early sign of gentrification. “I knew that the riots had turned on the Christadora, which was later turned into condos,” he said, referring to the fact that rioters had stormed the lobby of the building. “It was the only tall building in the neighborhood, and it sort of loomed over the park.” “There was a silent witness over the neighborhood,” he said. The early gentrification of the area (crystalized by the Tompkins Square Park Riots in 1988) and the AIDS epidemic all figure centrally in the novel, and it’s a subject Murphy is well-versed on: after all, he spent twenty years reporting on HIV/AIDS and the politics surrounding it.įor Murphy, the Christadora was just another one of those East Village oddities that you only noticed and knew about if you were really familiar with the neighborhood. The novel captures monumental neighborhood moments as it traverses the 1980s and ’90s straight into the early 2020s. Murphy’s novel, which came out this month, chronicles the life of various characters whose lives are all connected by the ever-looming Christadora, an apartment building on the north side of Tompkins Square Park. “It was gay grunge, it was gay punk, it was a very different aesthetic.” “Courtney Love was the patron saint of the gay East Village in the ’90s,” Murphy told us with a laugh. Marks? CBGB and other classic punk bars still going hard, only to be priced out of their leases less than a decade later? Punk heads and artists sharing studios in derelict tenements? For Tim Murphy, the New York-based journalist and author of the new novel Christodora, it was all of these things, but above all it was the home for a community of diverse people from different backgrounds, sexual orientations, and experiences who were searching for a place that would accept them just as they are.Īs a young man who arrived to the city in 1991, the East Village represented a haven for an alternative gay scene that was way less polished and more grungy than the one in Chelsea and the West Village. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the East Village in the 90s? Junkies passed out on Avenue A while runaway kids hung out in squats on St. Tim Murphy (Photo: Courtesy of Edwin Pabon)