On a Saturday night along Ludlow, Essex, or Rivington, the stylishly sloshed bar crowd might convince you that the LES is romanced by the same vision of the ultimate in taste and beauty as the East Village, but then you remember that the neighborhood was host to the worst smelling block in the city, a stench so powerful it made the New York Times. It’s this cohabitation of beauty and disgust that gives the neighborhood its uncanny charm, and I would argue, its soul. For every trendy bar, there’s a sketchy massage parlor up the street. For every impossibly attractive model, a cockroach in her apartment.

The face the LES shows to daylight is a good deal more gritty and bombed-out than Soho or the East Village, its western and northern neighbors. Studded with grim little parks and cramped six floor walkups, the LES demands still greater sacrifices in quality of life from the people who’ve already given up almost everything they could’ve had just to live in the center of universe. Rent is cheaper than the EV but not by enough, and the housing stock is on average noticeably worse. But I love this place. I love it.

Old men playing Mahjong across from hipsters playing bike polo (I know, I know). Faces in windows, rapt in bowls of soup dumplings. Drunk girls crying in a pile of broken heels and purses. Crazy people yelling incomprehensible and inaccurate slurs, crazy people spitting at you, crazy people urinating with blissful abandon. All of it. You have to take all of it. And then you just shake your head and say “Lower East Side.”

The LES is still dodgy (though very safe), but don’t call it underserved. It’s bursting with excellent (though not quite world-class) coffee, bars, and restaurants. Essex Market has plenty of bougie staples and is the new refuge of the legendary Shopsin’s. The Bowery Ballroom may be the most consistently great venue in the city. There’s heavy pollination from Chinatown, giving the neighborhood a cultural backbone and great dumplings. New development is eroding some of the nabe’s remaining personality, but I have faith that more Chinatown influence will keep it real.

As for demographics, the population age seems to vary, with newly arrived young professionals as well as older, longtime residents and families. Unlike much of the EV, the LES is not thirtysomething poison, though I imagine it is not an ideal place to raise a family. The benefits of living here as opposed to visiting are clearer compared to the EV and Soho. It’s not a community like you’d find in an outer borough, but it does have something. A vibe, maybe a sense of shared adversity. In any case, when Orchard street below Broome transitions from day to night with soft lights and fragments of quiet conversation, it might as well be Paris to me.