Posted in: Avengers, Comics, DC Comics, Marvel Comics, X-Men | Tagged: jack kirby, new york
Jack Kirby Museum Hosts Yancy Street Annual Walking Tour This Saturday
The Jack Kirby Museum Hosts Its Annual “Yancy Street” Walking Tour in New York’s Lower East Side this Saturday… are you going?
Article Summary
- Jack Kirby Museum hosts its annual Jack Kirby Walking Tour on Saturday, August 29, through New York’s Lower East Side.
- The guided Yancy Street tour starts at Jack Kirby Way and explores the streets, landmarks, and history that shaped Kirby.
- The Jack Kirby Walking Tour connects Kirby’s childhood on Essex Street to comic book history, including the Yancy Street Gang.
- The event celebrates Jack Kirby’s legacy, from his Lower East Side roots to his impact on Marvel, DC, and popular culture.
The Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center is once again inviting fans, historians, and New Yorkers to walk the streets that shaped one of comics’ most influential creators, Jack Kirby, this Saturday, the 29th of August, from 11 am-12.30 pm. The annual walking tour of the Lower East Side neighbourhood, where Jack Kirby grew up. The tour will begin under the Jack Kirby Way street sign at the northwest corner of Delancey and Essex Streets in Manhattan, permanently installed earlier this year, The tour traces the architecture, cultural landmarks, and daily life of the Lower East Side that informed Kirby’s early years and later work. Led by Kirby and comics historians, it generally draws an engaged crowd of fans each year and culminates in the connection between Kirby’s childhood neighbourhood and the co-naming of Jack Kirby Way. Organisers describe it as a unique on-location look at both the history of comics and New York City landmarks. The event also offers social media content generators a strong photo and coverage opportunity, with participants exploring the very streets that helped form one of the 20th century’s most important artists.
The Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center is a nonprofit dedicated to promoting the study, preservation, and appreciation of Kirby’s multifaceted career. It states that it supports education, exhibitions, publications, and multimedia projects that celebrate his life, inspirations, and creations while advancing a broader understanding of comic books and their creators.
Jack Kirby, who died in 1994, created or co-created many of the cornerstone characters and concepts of the Marvel and DC Universes, including the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, the X-Men, Hulk, Captain America, Silver Surfer, The Eternals, Darkseid, Fourth World, and New Gods, among hundreds of others. His storytelling and visual style helped define the look and language of comic books across genres such as superheroes, crime, war, romance, and science fiction and continues to ripple through comics, film, television, and popular culture.
Jack Kirby was born in 1917 on 147 Essex Street, a tenement building on the Lower East Side of New York City. His birth name was Jacob Kurtzberg. His parents were Jewish Austrians, and his father worked at a garment factory, as many immigrants did to put bread on the table. Jacob would anglicise his name to “Jack Kirby” when he entered the job market as a comics artist and illustrator at the age of 19 in 1936. He told the Comics Journal, “I hated the place because… it was the atmosphere itself. It was the way people behaved. I got sick of chasing people all over rooftops and having them chase me over rooftops. I knew that there was something better.”
Former Bleeding Cool writer Adi Tantimedh used to live on the same street in New York and looked it up for us a while back. He wrote “It’s still the same building Kirby was born in. 147 Essex was built in 1900 and hasn’t been demolished to make way for a condominium or fancy overpriced hotel as many buildings on the Lower East Side have been in the last ten years. The five-story walk-up has been renovated several times and probably changed ownership a few times in the last 100 years or so. Now painted a pretty red and nestled between another renovated tenement building on its left with a Chinese tea shop on the ground floor, 147 is home to Lazar Air conditioning and Heating, with a modern condominium on its right.”
“The Lower East Side can still be a tough neighbourhood, but nowhere as tough or chaotic as Kirby’s time. As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, the area was so dangerous that it was considered a no-go zone after 7 pm. The Lower East, the East Village and Alphabet City were drug- and crime-ridden, and full of homeless people, but also a place of cheap rent, so many members of New York’s artistic community lived here for a long time. That began to change in the 1980s when gentrification began to transform Downtown New York. Gentrification only began to hit the Lower East Side south of Houston Street in the early 2000s and now it’s truly transforming the neighbourhood with condominiums, hipster bars, hotels, boutique restaurants, art galleries, a Trader Joe’s opening, and the new Essex Crossing shopping and apartment complex scheduled to launch in 2019.”
“Kirby continued to draw on his memories of the Lower East Side in his most famous work for Marvel Comics. The Yancy Street Gang was a reference to Delancey Street and the street gangs he used to be part of during his youth. In fact, Downtown New York plays a crucial part in the history of American comic books – many of the most renowned artists were the children of immigrants who grew up there and formed gangs to protect themselves from others. By the time they grew up and became professional artists in the comics industry in the 1930s and 1940s, they already knew each other from the times they ran around beating each other up on the Lower East Side.”
“147 Essex Street is right smack in the middle of what locals currently call Hell Square, a nine-block party zone bordered by East Houston Street, Allan Street, Delancey Street and Essex Street. The zone is filled with hipster bars, boutique restaurants and clubs, drawing in hipsters, tourists and partygoers from out of town, resulting in a sharp rise in muggings, rapes and violent assaults at night. The high number of bars and liquor licenses granted in the area has directly contributed to the rise in crime. Many of the perpetrators are muggers and gang members from outside the neighbourhood, usually from the Bronx or Brooklyn and drinkers in the Bridge & Tunnel Crowd. Jack Kirby was born on Essex Street in New York in 1917 and spent much of his early life trying to get away from those poor surroundings. His superhuman work ethic and talent got him out, but those were developed in part through his involvement with the Boys Brotherhood Republic, an organisation that helped many young men to put their youthful energy to constructive purposes. In one way or another, he wrote a lot about the B.B.R. in some of his comics and about the surrounding area. In the Fantastic Four comic, Ben Grimm fought an ongoing feud with the kids of The Yancy Street Gang, which was a thinly-disguised version of a real-life gang that claimed Delancey Street as their home turf.”
And now the street is named after Jack Kirby, and the fictionalised version he made famous. Permanently. And this Saturday you can go walk it…
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