The Lower East Side’s popularity was diminishing and the real estate market was working to spruce the neighborhood up a bit, to give it a better name and to redevelop. Because of the negative associations and the slum label, the committees were working to start fresh and create a new community.
One particular sentence about the situation, written in Mele’s Selling the Lower East Side, caught my attention and brought me back to our discussion on assimilation. While the older immigrants who had moved out of the Lower East Side were considered successful, “ the vibrant and sizable ethnic communities that continued to call the Lower East Side home were cast as failures of assimilation”(Mele 88). This seems like a particularly strong, and perhaps unintentionally offensive statement about “those left behind”(88). Success seems to be the ability to assimilate, and the ability to assimilate seems to be driven by the financial success that enabled one to leave the poor conditions of the neighborhood. While monetary success is definitely an important element, is it sole factor of assimilation? If the people who were left behind, “the queer, the unadjusted, the radical, the bohemian, and the criminal…the lost souls” are defined as unassimilated, then it seems like the term is narrowly defined. There are uncountable Americans who are queer, unadjusted, radical, bohemian and criminal, but does that make them un-American or unassimilated? It seems like American born citizens have the right to be different and the right to go on their own paths, or stay in a poor community. Immigrants, however, who did not live the standard American Dream, weather by choice of staying with the misfits, or just because they could not make it, were thought of as unassimilated and unsuccessful. Perhaps the best thing to do is to drop the terms and just let everyone live as he wants.
On a completely different note I find it interesting to read about my own religious community and its part in the urban/social development of the Lower East Side. Mele writes how many Jews moved out of the Lower East Side to more comfortable homes (I guess that means Jews assimilated?) but how there were always a sense of nostalgia to the “Old World” neighborhood. Even as I walked through the neighborhood with my Grandfather, I remember him reminiscing and pointing out old shops and synagogues that thrived decades ago. Those first shops, restaurants, synagogues, schools and other institutions were the beginning steps of a life in America and even as the immigrants continued to build in new comminutes, the originals landmarks “could not easily be left behind”(86).
