The Lower East Side

Hasia Diner

Situated below Houston Street and east of the Bowery, the Lower East Side has long played a crucial role in the life of New York City. Starting in the 1840s, it became the destination neighborhood of choice--or default--for immigrants coming to the United States. In that decade, the first tenements went up and more were built to accommodate the increasing number of new arrivals. The earliest of the tenement dwellers and neighborhood residents tended to be German and Irish. But by the 1870s, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and southern Italians swelled such streets as Hester, Orchard, Pitt, Rivington, Delancy, Essex, and more, many of which became the stuff of literature, film, historical scholarship, and memory. In its heyday as an immigrant receiving space, from the 1890s through the 1910s, reformers, journalists, and photographers flocked to witness the crowding on both the streets and in the tenements, making the neighborhood's denizens among the most reported upon, studied, and depicted immigrants in the United States.

The Lower East Side, a polyglot neighborhood that housed immigrants from numerous countries, loomed particularly important for American Jews, functioning as their "central address." As in fact the largest concentration of Jews in any city any place in the world, the Lower East Side produced books, newspapers, magazines, plays, music, and other texts that Jews around the United States and even back in Eastern Europe consumed. By the end of World War II, the Lower East Side came to be venerated in American Jewish popular culture as the essence of authenticity.

With the cessation of immigration from Europe in the 1920s, the opening up of working class neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and the economic mobility of the American-born children of the immigrants, the neighborhood lost population. That population, however, was rebuilt as immigrants from China and other parts of Asia and various parts of the Americas came to occupy the same streets and tenements as the earlier immigrants did.

The Lower East Side now serves at least three constituencies and fulfills three different functions. It provides homes and entrepreneurial spaces for new immigrants, changing as the sources of immigration change. It has become something of a "hip" area, with quite expensive condominiums, shops, restaurants, and bars opening up to serve an affluent young urban clientele. Finally, today's Lower East Side serves as a tourist destination for visitors to New York eager to engage with the remnants and relics of the old immigrant era. Such institutions as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and the restored Eldridge Street Synagogue, as well as eating establishments such as Kossar's bialy bakery and Yonah Shimmel's knish shop, give twenty-first-century visitors a chance to experience something of the flavor of the neighborhood that figured so prominently in the lore and literature of the Lower East Side.