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.