Profile of a Neighborhood: The Lower East Side
One day last week for work I had to make a delivery to an office building on Seventh Avenue and 47th street. I got on the train at 14th street and 1st avenue, squinting from the sunlight. When I got off of the train in midtown, as I walked from the subway to the lobby of the colossal, black, metallic office building that was my destination, I was struck by something incredible. The office building took up most of the west side of the avenue and the main entrance faced east. At this time in the afternoon, the city should be sunny like it was on the Lower East Side. But the buildings on the east side of the street blocked the sun from coming through. There was a bit of light that managed to squeeze between two buildings on the east side of the street. The office building that I was looking at was completely dark, except for one strip of light, peeking through the hole between buildings. It made me laugh. The people in the building each got a bit of sunlight, probably for 15 minutes every day, until the strip of light moved as the sun changed positions in the sky.
I delivered the package and got back on the train to go to the store. When I got off at 14th street, I could see the sun again, and I enjoyed feeling the heat on the back of my neck as I strolled back to work. The LES is one of the few places left in Manhattan without many skyscrapers, and that is what makes the Lower East Side such a great place to spend time. But that is changing rapidly. New hotels and apartment buildings are being built up, looming over the original tenement buildings. Not only will these huge buildings eliminate sunlight, but they will destroy the rich history and culture of this unique neighborhood.
The Lower East Side spans from East Houston Street to the north, the East River to the east, Canal Street to the South and the Bowery to the west. This historic neighborhood has undergone a massive transformation in the past 2 decades. The rapid gentrification of the LES has prompted the National Trust for Historic Preservation to place the neighborhood on their list of America’s Most Endangered Places (National Trust for Historic Preservation). According to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, “permits were approved for the full demolition of 11 buildings on the Lower East Side, compared with just one in 2006” (1). The new LES will be drastically different from the one that thousands of immigrants lived in during their first years in America.
The Lower East Side used to be a neighborhood filled with immigrants from all over the world. When we think of New York City as a melting pot, we must think of the history of the Lower East Side. Home to countless different ethnic groups, often overlapping, the fabric of the LES is complex and unique. The neighborhood has seen conflict between ethnic groups, extreme poverty and for some, the success of the American Dream.
The Lower East Side was home to a huge number of immigrants. During the peak of immigration into the United States at the turn of the 20th century, almost ¾ of all of the people who entered the country came in through the port of New York (National Archives). According to LowerEastSideNY.com, upon their arrival, many immigrants to New York City were “directed to head towards the Lower East Side”. 97 Orchard Street, now the location of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, was once home to almost 7,000 immigrants (National Archives).The neighborhood has been home to many different ethnic groups.
The LES was once known as Keindeutschland, Little Germany, because in its early development, it was home to a large German population. According to the New York Public Library’s profile of the Lower East Side, starting in the mid-19th century, the streets were lined with German cafes and grocery stores, beer halls and one of the first department stores, Ridley’s, on Grand street (10). Then there was an influx in Jewish residents in the late-19th century, running from economic troubles and religious persecution. So many of these Jewish immigrants came to the Lower East Side that if it was its own city, it would have “been the largest Jewish city in the world in the late-19th-century” (Krucoff 24). The neighborhood also included strong Italian, Polish and Ukrainian communities (LowerEastSideNY.com 1).
Today, the neighborhood has a strong but dwindling Ukrainian community. Some still call it “Little Ukraine”. During the recent crisis in Ukraine, residents of the neighborhood have shown their support for their homeland by hanging up signs and placing candles in window sills. I spoke to a woman named Anna who worked in a business with one of these signs (Anna chose not to give her last name). Anna came to New York City in 1995 and has lived on the Lower East Side with various family members since then. When asked about the sign Anna said, “I feel confused because I want to be there fighting with my family and friends but I have built a life for myself here, so I will try to support them from here”. In regards to the changing neighborhood, she said, “yes, the neighborhood is very different now, but we will stay here as long as we can, we have roots here.”
The neighborhood has seen much transformation since its original occupation by poor immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Next came the hippies, artists and beatniks of the 1960 and 1970s, like Patti Smith, for example, who lived on St. Marks place with Robert Mapplethorpe (Smith). In the past few decades, the neighborhood has entered its final stage as real estate developers demolish historic buildings for trendy hotels and condominiums.
For most of its history, the Lower East Side was considered a slum. In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, “families were crowded into small, run-down tenement apartments” with no running water, indoor plumbing and little light. Disease spread quickly in such small apartments, and fires started easily. The Tenement Museum on Orchard Street has restored a tenement apartment to its former state. The museum tours offer an in depth look at how these people lived. From my trip to the museum, I recall very little light in the apartments, tiny rooms and walls that were falling apart.
Due to the poor living conditions of people on the LES, there was an active social reform movement in the neighborhood. Organizations like the Educational Alliance and the Henry Street Settlement were established to teach people about basic hygiene and provide education for children and adults. Social reformer Jacob Riis took photographs of people in the tenements and published a book called “How the Other Half Lives”. Middle and upper class people were shocked to see what poor conditions people in their own city had to live with.
Beginning in the late 1950s, the LES began to symbolize the antithesis of suburban American society. One of the few neighborhoods in New York with such ethnic diversity and class differences, the Lower East Side was the perfect epicenter of the rise of the 1960s counterculture. According to Christopher Mele, author of “Selling the Lower East Side”, between 1964 and 1968, there was a “cultural explosion of art, music, theater, film, writing, and… public performance, all of which were linked to the loosely connected hippie movement” (154).
The real estate developers and retailers coming into the Lower East Side are not necessarily trying to hide the LES’s poor beginnings. In fact, Mele, the LES is being rebranded as a cleaner, more commercial and trendy version of the urban despair the LES has always been known for. He writes, “the contemporary redevelopment of the Lower East Side is premised on the symbolic inclusion of the characteristics long associated with the Lower East Side – among others, continual political activism, the working-class struggle for survival, and the presence of marginalized subcultures and the avant-garde” (Melem, VIII). The new LES’s culture of urban despair is meant to appeal to affluent “alternative” types and is corporatized. Mele describes this phenomenon well by referencing the musical Rent. Playing on Broadway when his book was published, Mele states that most of the people in the audience are white upper-middle-class residents who ironically story a group of young people in the East Village and their “urban struggles with AIDS, heroin addiction, homelessness, squatting, forced evictions, real estate gouging and the dilemma of ‘making art’ and ‘selling out’” (1). This time period along with the history of the LES is now a marketing approach.
The gentrification of the Lower East Side has led to a loss of diversity that once made this immigrant neighborhood so multicultural and unique. According to the New York Census, there was a decline of every non-white and non-Asian group from 1990 to 2010. Most telling, there was a 10% of Hispanics living on the Lower East Side from 1990 to 2010 (Nyc.gov). In a matter of years, the LES will look nothing like the extremely diverse neighborhood it once was.
Longtime residents of the neighborhood are not just sitting back while these changes take place. John Casey is an Irish immigrant and small business owner who has lived on the Lower East Side for over 30 years now. Casey says that he sees resistance against redevelopment among residents all of the time: “I read a few blogs that talk all about the gentrification and how angry people are… people are angry, that’s for sure. For me and my friends, the Lower East Side has been home for so long, it has such a rich culture and it’s heartbreaking to see corner stores that have been there for decades close and then you see a chain store opening up a month later.”
Casey reads “The Lo-Down” and “Lower East Side History Project”. Both blogs update readers on which stores are closing, what new efforts are being made to prevent the redevelopment of this neighborhood. A recent post on the “Lower East Side History Project” blog reports the closing of King Glassware, one of the oldest surviving restaurant supply stores on the Bowery. The store survived “two world wars, the Great Depression, recessions in the 1980s and 2000s” but could not survive in the face of gentrification (Lower East Side History Project).There are several organizations and online publications that inform residents about unfair changes and try to keep the old LES alive.
Walking through the streets of the Lower East Side, I can still feel the sun beating on my neck, but in a few decades, when old tenements will be demolished to make way for new condominiums and trendy coffee shops, it will not be as sunny. The LES still has an incredible story to tell, the neighborhood has seen so much change and so many different kinds of people.
Works Cited
Anna. Personal interview. 20 Apr. 2014.
Casey, John. Personal interview. 20 Apr. 2014.
“11 Most Endangered Historic Places: The Lower East Side.” preservationnation.org. National Trust for Historic Preservation, n.d. Web. 7 May 2014. <http://www.preservationnation.org/issues/11-most-endangered/locations/lower-east-side.html#.U2phFIFdVBk>.
“District Profile 3.” nyc.gov. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 May 2014. <http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/census/census2010/pgrhc.pdf>.
“History of the LES – Lower East Side New York.” Lower East Side New York History of the LES Comments. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 May 2014. <http://www.lowereastsideny.com/about/history-of-the-les/>.
Krucoff , Rebecca. “The Lower East Side.” New York Neighborhoods. New York Public Library, n.d. Web. 7 May 2014. <http://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/lowereastsideguide-final_0.pdf>.
“LOWER EAST SIDE HISTORY PROJECT .the blog.” Bowery loses another staple: King Glassware closes. N.p., 12 Mar. 2014. Web. 7 May 2014. <http://evhp.blogspot.com/2014/03/bowery-loses-another-staple-king.html#comment-form>.
“Life on the Lower East Side: A Tenement over Time.” National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives and Records Administration, n.d. Web. 7 May 2014. <http://www.archives.gov/nyc/education/tenement.html>.
“Life on the Lower East Side: A Tenement over Time.” National Archives and Records Administration. National Archives and Records Administration, n.d. Web. 7 May 2014. <http://www.archives.gov/nyc/education/tenement.html>.
Mele, Christopher. Selling the Lower East Side: culture, real estate, and resistance in New York City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Print.
Smith, Patti. Just kids. New York: Ecco, 2010. Print.
