140-142 Second Avenue

On 2nd Avenue, just south of 9th Street at No. 140-142, sits one of the East Village's oddest structures.  Clad in metal and adorned with Cyrillic lettering, the building sports a slightly downtrodden and forbidding look, seeming dropped into the neighborhood from some dystopian sci-fi thriller. In reality, for the last half century the building has housed the Ukrainian National Home, best known as a great place to get some good food or drink. But scratch the surface of this architectural oddity and you'll find a winding history replete with Jewish gangsters, German teetotalers, jazz-playing hipsters, and the American debut of one of Britain's premier post-punk bands, all in a building which, under its metallic veneer, dates back nearly two centuries.
Learn this fascinating history