In the decaying tenements of the lower east side today- in that section that real estate agents renamed “East Village” in the hope of raising rents—lives a motley throng of beats, hippies, acid heads, dope-pushers, bikies, yippies, and crazies. At another time, Karl Marx described the originals “alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jail-birds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, mackereaux, brothel-keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, rag-pickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars, in short the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass thrown hither and thither, which the French term la Bohème..."