Farewell to the Hells Angels
A few days ago, news broke that the Hells Angels would be leaving the neighborhood. Many East Village residents are celebrating; others, like me, mourn. I realize the group’s history is deeply troubling. But their departure seems a symptom of too much drastic historical change, too fast. Two years ago, the Streit’s matzoh factory, which had been on the Lower East Side since 1916, decamped for Rockland County and has been replaced by multimillion-dollar condos. In 2007, the luxe Standard Hotel swallowed the longtime home of Beat poet Hettie Cohen Jones, ex-wife of Amiri Baraka and neighborhood mainstay. In 2005, McGurk’s Suicide Hall, the notorious post-Civil-War brothel and saloon that later became the home of feminist pioneer Kate Millett and a passel of women artists, was razed; it too is now a luxury condo.
I moved to this block in 2000. The Hells Angels (no apostrophe in Hells, please) were right across the street, where they’d been since 1969. In 1977, they’d officially bought their building from the Bronx’s Birdie Ruderman, for $10. Census records show that Birdie was born in Poland in 1901, lived in the East Village for decades and moved—along with many other coming-up-in-the-world Jews of her era, to the Bronx. She died in 1979.