Leonard Abrams started the
East Village Eye after moving to the East Village in the mid-1970s. He told the
New Yorker decades later, that he knew that the kind of newspaper he wanted to run “required a social movement and a scene.” Its first office was at 167
Ludlow Street, moving repeatedly in and around this relatively inexpensive pocket of downtown
Manhattan. The magazine had a total of 72 issues with
Robert Mapplethorpe,
Sade, and local musician
John Lurie among its cover stars. Writers included
Carlo McCormick,
Cookie Mueller,
Gary Indiana,
David Wojnarowicz, and artist and later
Artnet writer
Walter Robinson.
The Eye was most influential in the early 1980s, filling a gap after the closure of the
SoHo Weekly News in 1982 and before the rise of
Details magazine. The
Eye is said to be the first publication to print a comprehensive definition of
hip-hop in an interview in the January 1982 issue. In the interview by the writer
Michael Holman with
Afrika Bambaataa the term was summarized as “the all-inclusive tag for the
rapping,
breaking, graffiti-writing, crew-fashion-wearing street subculture.” It let the critic Steven Hager, who was fired from the
New York Daily News for praising graffiti, write seriously about the medium. ==References==