Our annual “Yesteryear” issue this year chronicles more than a century of life in the Ukrainian Village. Here, heybonanos writes on how Little Ukraine came to be
The spring festival at St. George in 1984. Photo: Peter Bennett/Peter Bennett In 1931, a writer named George Tichenor made his way from his home on West 21st Street down to the Lower East Side to see a play. Galicia Aflame, by the Ukrainian American playwright William Chopinsky, was perhaps not deathless theater, but it was sturdy activist work. It was staged in front of 2,000 viewers at the Manhattan Lyceum, a big barn of a room on East 4th Street.
It exists within living memory, though. “You’d walk up Second Avenue or down 7th Street, and in the space of three blocks you’d meet ten people you knew,” recalls Alexander Motyl, who grew up in the neighborhood in the 1950s and ’60s and is now a professor of post-Soviet studies at Rutgers. “My parents and their generation would actually refer to Americans as ‘the foreigners.
A small group of Orthodox Christians lived and worshipped at the top of the Ukrainian neighborhood, around a church they bought from a German congregation on East 14th Street. The much larger Catholic population coalesced around East 7th Street, where in 1911 they bought a different old German church that they renamed St. George. That building became the core of the area we now think of as Little Ukraine, or Ukrainian Village.
Photo: Courtesy of Sofika Zielyk, Gift of Nadia Popovych. Courtesy of The Ukrainian Museum, Lubow Wolynetz, Ivanka Zajac, Gift of Iryna and Jaroslaw Kurowyckyj. Courtesy of The Ukrainian Museum New Year’s Eve at Blue & Gold circa 1960.Congregants of St. George gather by the East River after Mass in 1955.Jaroslaw Kurowyckyj, far left, and his son Jaroslaw Jr. in their butcher shop in 1983.
While in the displaced-persons camps after the war, says Motyl, the Ukrainians “created an alternative society — institutions, literary clubs, all kinds of things. When they came to America, they brought those institutions with them so they didn’t have to start over.” You didn’t have to stay entirely in that bubble if you lived in Little Ukraine, but you could. You could drink at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge up on St.
According to Lida Sawkiw, one of Pidhorodecky’s nieces, her aunt was a clearinghouse for gossip. She would hire new immigrants to help out in the kitchen, slip the bartender a few extra bucks if he was broke at the end of the week, and serve as a connector for the younger crowd. “She was everybody’s aunt,” Sawkiw says. “And I think she’s godmother to at least half a million kids.”
To hear the Ukrainians tell it, though, it was just one more coexistence. The overlapping populations occupied one physical space, but they didn’t really mix, at least not culturally. “When the whole flower-power thing happened on 8th Street,” Zajac recalls, “all these kids were sitting with flowers in their hair, and I was marching past, going to dance practice. My husband was a little more into it, but it didn’t wake me up. Only Elvis, really.
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