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Swami Bhaktivedanta came to USA and went swiftly to the Archetype Spiritual Neighborhood, the New York Lower East Side, and …

– Allen Ginsberg from his introduction to the Macmillan Bhagavad-gītā As It Is

PRABHUPĀDA’S NEW NEIGHBORHOOD was not as run-down as the nearby Bowery, though it certainly was less than quaint. Right across …

Up a block, but on the same side of the avenue as the storefront, was the Church of the Nativity, …

Second Avenue was a main traffic artery for east Manhattan, and the stoplight at the intersection of Houston and Second …

At 26 Second Avenue there were actually two storefronts. The one to the north was a coin laundry, and the …

To the left of the gift shop’s window was its front door, a dark wooden frame holding a full-length pane …

The courtyard was paved with concrete geometric sections and encircled with shrub gardens and tall trees. There was a picnic …

Overlooking the courtyard from the rear building of 26 Second Avenue was Prabhupāda’s second-floor apartment, where he would now live, …

The next room was bare except for a fancy coffee table, which became Prabhupāda’s altar. Here he placed a framed …

Both rooms were freshly painted, and the floors were clean hardwood parquet. The bathroom was clean and serviceable, as was …

Although Carl, Mike, Carol, James, Bill, and others had encouraged him to move here, some of them now found it …

The Lower East Side has a history of change and human suffering as old as New York. Three hundred years …

The Lower East Side first became a slum in the 1840s, when thousands of Irish immigrants, driven by the Irish …

Next the Puerto Ricans thronged in – hundreds of thousands in the 1950s – immigrating from their island poverty or …

Then, only a few years before Prabhupāda’s arrival, a different kind of slum-dweller had appeared on the Lower East Side. …

At first the newcomers were mostly young artists, musicians, and intellectuals, similar to the hip crowd of Prabhupāda’s Bowery days. …

As if responding to an instinctual call, younger teenage runaways joined the older hippies, and following the runaways came the …

The hippies journeyed to the Lower East Side in full conviction that this was the place to be, just as …

It was an uneasy coexistence, with hippies on one side and Puerto Ricans, Poles, and Ukranians on the other. The …