New York, NY —

This weekend the East Village celebrates its offbeat cultural legacy with the Howl Festival. The event is named for the famous 1957 poem by Allen Ginsberg, who died ten years ago. The neighborhood has gone through big changes, but the festival shows it hasn't lost its quirkiness. WNYC's Siddhartha Mitter checked it out.

POETS: "I Saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…"

REPORTER: As the finale of a night of readings in Tompkins Square Park, fifteen poets of different backgrounds gathered on stage Friday evening for a raucous group performance of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Lisette Johnson, who said she was a poet herself, was taking in the scene.

JOHNSON: This is my favorite event of the whole year in New York City, and there’s something really electrifying about hearing over ten people reading something as iconic as Howl.

REPORTER: Ginsberg lived in this neighborhood for many years, until his death in 1997, and his most famous poem is a sort of anthem for the alternative crowd in the East Village. But Johnson said hearing it in this setting stirred mixed emotions.

JOHNSON: Like you have festivals to read it rather than it being free form, him standing over there in the grass, no one does that so much anymore. So it’s a strange, bittersweet thing.

REPORTER: One bittersweet aspect for Johnson and her friend Ryan Cheresnik is that they don’t live in the neighborhood anymore: they were priced out, and they moved to Williamsburg.

LUCK: Ginsberg couldn’t live here anymore if he was a young poet. No young poets, no young painters can live here and just ply their art.

REPORTER: Fran Luck is one of the long-term residents who came to the neighborhood when it was still cheap and dingy and dug in their heels. Around them, the East Village has changed enormously. An artist named Fly is one these old timers. She’s lived here for seventeen years.

FLY: All these restaurants and hair salons that people can’t go into who actually live here because they’re way too expensive, and there’s all these nice new buildings coming up that cost three thousand dollars a month to live in…

REPORTER: On Saturday afternoon Fly was selling books at a table at the festival, on behalf of the St Marks Bookstore. Friends of hers kept coming up to say hello, people with names like Famous and Copper. One couple wore a combination of blue spandex and copper lame cut more or less like bathing suits. Fly said that for all the changes, the neighborhood still has a large creative community.

There are still an amazing amount of people around who have been around for a long time and who fought really hard to stay here. And so we’re not going down like that.

REPORTER: The festival’s organizer is Bob Holman, a poet who runs the Bowery Poetry Club nearby. He’s also connected with the Nuyorican Poets Café, and among the group he gathered to perform Howl were young African American and Latino writers who cut their teeth at these local institutions.

HOLMAN: We Can get together to celebrate what is great about this neighborhood and in that way, maybe hang onto it.

REPORTER: On Friday night, the streets around Tompkins Square Park were once again thronged with bar-hoppers from all over the city. But inside the park, artists and poets and neighborhood characters were happily, gleefully howling back.

POETS: [Reading]

REPORTER: For WNYC, I’m Siddhartha Mitter