Immigrants came in waves to the United States of America for many reasons, including religious persecution, anti-Semitism, and economic hardship. When they came to New York City, they lived in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a place that came to be known as immoral and evil. The upper classes described the border of the place from good to evil. People, who were once innocent, went to the Lower East Side and lost any of the naivety about that. For example, in Mele’s Selling the Lower East Side, the book Cast Adrift is mentioned, which tells the gruesome tale of Flora Bond, a young woman new to the city and inexperienced in its ways, who upon entry into the ghetto, immediately falls in with the wrong crowd and eventually dies as a consequence of her depraved ghetto lifestyle.
Most of the upper class never actually ventured into the Lower East Side and received all their information about it from publications, such as comics and newspapers. They learned about prostitutes walking around on the streets and drug addicts and alcoholics going about their business out in the open. Although these people did also exist in the middle- and upper-classes, they were much more hidden. The idea that it was considered immoral in the Lower East Side is hypocritical because the same things occurred outside the LES, and it was considered to be fine.
However, the middle- and upper-classes were making assumptions without knowing the truth. They should have tried to learn more about the Lower East Side before thinking that it was immoral, unethical, and evil. One thing they found immoral was the fact that many families lived in one apartment, and mixed genders lived in these apartments. However, they should have realized that it wasn’t the choice of the immigrants. It was because the immigrants did not have enough money to afford the apartments in the tenements. The tenement owners hiked up the prices so that they could make a profit, and they had no care about whether or not the immigrants could afford the prices they set. So although the upper classes thought the ghetto was an alien place with its own values and social rules, it really was not. The Lower East Side was different since it was composed of immigrant communities, but it wasn’t immoral or evil. The aspects of middle class civilization were not devoid in the ghetto, as the middle-classes tended to think.
