WELCOME TO ALPHABET CITY

Photo: Avenue Q – Kate Monster, Kelli Sawyer, Princeton, Robert McClure

The creators of AVENUE Q wanted the set for the show to evoke a gritty, urban streetscape, searching all over the boroughs of New York for just the “right” look. Set designer Anna Louizos took photos of neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn, and the East Village, locations where AVENUE Q might actually take place.

And then, it occurred to everyone: Avenue Q would actually be located in -- and realistically reflect -- the “letters neighborhood” of Alphabet City, the eastern-most stretch of Manhattan’s East Village. Its name comes from Avenues A, B, C, and D, the only avenues in Manhattan to have single-letter names. The area is sandwiched between 14th Street to the north and Houston Avenue to the south, and points east from Avenues A,B,C, and D to the massive public housing projects on FDR Drive. Although “Q” would be, in the real world, 13 streets after “D,” it was not hard to imagine it as part of the low-rise, pre-war tenements that define the neighborhood. The mythical Avenue Q thus became part of the very real Alphabet City.

Alphabet City became a hub of the counterculture of the 1960s when artists and students from nearby New York University and The Cooper Union flocked there in search of low rents. An ethnic mix, roughly two different populations exist: settled families representing successive waves of immigrants alongside young singles and a fringe avant-garde.

A century ago, what is now called the East Village took shape as the home of newly-arrived immigrants, and with each wave of these new residents, it spread out eastward to become the nucleus of what is now Alphabet City.

At one time, the Alphabet City section of the East Village was known as Little Germany; in the late 19th and early 20th centuries Eastern Europeans replaced Germans as the dominant ethnic group. Alphabet City then became home to Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrants and was the most densely populated part of New York City. This density was partially a result of the area’s proximity to the City’s garment factories, which were the major source of employment for newly arrived immigrants.

By the middle of the 20th century, Alphabet City was settled by Puerto Ricans who arrived in such numbers there that Alphabet City is often called Losaida, “Spanglish” for Lower East Side, and Avenue C has been dubbed Losaida Avenue.

During the 1980s, Alphabet City became home to an eclectic mix of Puerto Rican and African American families living alongside struggling artists and musicians who were mostly young and white. Attracted by various ethnic movements, low rents and a creative atmosphere, Alphabet City drew a growing bohemian population. The Broadway musical Rent portrays some of the positive and negative aspects of this time and place. The characters live on East 11th Street and Avenue B, and the motion picture version of Rent makes it explicitly clear that the story takes place between 1989 and 1990, before any of the more recent gentrification of Alphabet City.

The late 1990s ushered in a new, distinctly less gritty era for Alphabet City. Apartments have been renovated and formerly abandoned storefronts are bustling with new restaurants, nightclubs and retail establishments. A new population of generally young professionals and executives is being added to the working-class cultural mix, people who are starting to build careers and are attracted by the area’s slightly bohemian flavor, multi-ethnicity and affordability.

AVENUE Q joins Rent and other well-known movies and television shows set in Alphabet City: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the long-running, acclaimed television police drama NYPD Blue, much of the 2004 movie Supersize Me and the1999 film Flawless, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert DeNiro.