Avenue A from Tompkins Square Park

The East Village is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, New York City.

The East Village is bounded by Fourteenth Street on the north, the East River on the east, Houston Street on the south, and roughly the Bowery and Third Avenue on the west. It lies east of Greenwich Village and NoHo, south of Stuyvesant Town, and north of the Lower East Side. The East Village includes the neighborhood known as Alphabet City.

The East Village was—and still is by many—regarded as part of the Lower East Side. In the 1980s, real estate developers began promoting the name East Village to dissociate the neighborhood from the Lower East Side's reputation as a slum district and to try to capture the cachet of Greenwich Village. This has led many to believe that the East Village is part of Greenwich Village. Extensive gentrification during the 1980s around Tompkins Square Park was a contributing factor to several riots (in 1988 and 1995) as police disbanded homeless encampments.

Other than geography, the East Village's most notable commonalities with Greenwich Village are a colorful history, vibrant social and cultural outlets, and street names that often diverge from the norm. The most notable of those steets are Bowery, a north-south avenue which also lends its name to the somewhat overlapping neighborhood of Bowery; St. Mark's Place, an crosstown street well-known for countercultural, especially punk, businesses; and Astor Place/Cooper Square, home of the Public Theater and the Cooper Union, one of the world's most prestigious art and architechture schools.