News from Around the Web

Seven-alarm fire on Grand Street late Sunday night. Apparently the building owners have been sited for multiple violations of housing codes in the last two years. From Fire Chief Kilduff: "Because the buildings are old - the two buildings here are 110 years old - there's an awful lot of voids and shafts in these buildings and the fire just travels all through the place." (These would be the air shafts meant to increase air circulation in the apartments.)

Reports have called this area both "Chinatown" and "the Lower East Side." Historic boundary of the LES = the Bowery.
[Bowery Boogie]
[Daily News]

From Darfur to Brooklyn - photographs of refugees who have settled in Kensington.
[New York Times]

Urban spelunker Steve Duncan gets to the heart of the City's infrastructure (and takes some cool photos of old sewers, too).
[Columbia Magazine]

T.J. Stiles, coming to Tenement Talks on May 14, wins the Pulitzer.
[Pulitzer.org]

Edited to add...
Lower East Side photos, in color, from the 1940s. Cool!!
[City Noise]

Questions for Curatorial - Yiddish on the LES

Curatorial Director Dave answers your questions.

Were the dialects of Yiddish spoken on the Lower East Side during the turn of the last century mutually intelligible? For example, if they have lived at 97 Orchard Street at the same time, could the Polish Levine and Lithuanian Rogarshevsky families have understood one another?

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants to the Lower East Side hailed from a number of different regions, among them Hungary, Galicia, Rumania, and Russia. Although the "eastern Yiddish" dialect spoken by people from each of these regions evinced a shared linguistic heritage, their “Lithuanian,” “Polish,” and “Ukrainian” sub-dialects differed substantially from one another in vocabulary and grammar, as well as in the pronunciation of certain vowels.

A language “always in a rapid process of growth and dissolution,” the Yiddish spoken by Eastern European Jewish immigrants was further transformed by the encounter with America. The historian Irving Howe writes, “A whole sublanguage or patois grew up in the immigrant districts, neither quite English nor quite Yiddish, in which the vocabulary of the former was twisted to the syntax of the latter.”

It is possible, therefore, that while Yiddish-speaking immigrants from modern Poland (like the Levines) may have experienced some immediate difficulty in communicating with Yiddish-speaking immigrants from modern Lithuania, a shared linguistic heritage and an increasing overlap between Yiddish and American English appears to have narrowed this linguistic divide.

A New Oral History of Life at 97 Orchard Street

Derya and Dave in the Curatorial Department give an update on their recent research:

Last Friday we trekked to Vorhees, New Jersey to interview Jaqueline Burinescu Richter, who was born in 97 Orchard Street in 1919. Ms. Richter remembered many things about her days as a girl at 97 Orchard Street, including stories about the Katz sisters and Mrs. Rosenthal, who cleaned the building.

Visitors might remember that Ruth Katz's name is scrawled on a fourth-floor apartment wall and that Fannie was in charge of 97 Orchard Street from 1918 to 1941. The family changed their name from Rogarshevsky to Rosenthal, and while we use the former name on the tour, Ms. Richter would have remembered her as Mrs. Rosenthal.

Ms. Richter also told a story about going to the bath houses on Allen Street as a girl and hiding behind a wall when people came to check the tickets because she wanted to stay there longer than her ticket permitted.

Ms. Richter’s father died during the 1918 flu pandemic. Here is a photo of him that was made into cufflinks!

Ms. Richter was a very friendly girl and knew everyone who lived in the building. She introduced her mother to John Fiorentino, an immigrant from Malta who lived on the fifth floor. Eventually her mother and John were married in 1929.

The family also has a trunk that was used by Ms. Richter’s mother or father when they immigrated to America. She is interested in donating to the museum. We will keep you updated as we learn more.

- Posted by Derya Golpinar and Dave Favaloro

Opening and Closing - Guss' Pickles

A look at mom and pop shops that are leaving the neighborhood, and the businesses that are replacing them.



It's all over the local blogosphere: Guss' Pickles, the 90-year-old neighborhood staple on the corner of Broome and Orchard, is on its way out - to a larger, cheaper storefront in Brooklyn. Rent was getting too high, Lo-Down reports, and "when the city put a Muni Meter directly in front of [owner Patricia Fairhurst's] pickle barrels, blocking customers' access, it was the last straw."

Guss' may be famous for surviving decades of gentrification and demographic shifts, but it isn't the only place to buy briny cucumbers east of the Bowery. A quick browse on the web turned up a couple of relative newcomers that stay faithful to old-school preparation techniques (and may become, decades from now, the new neighborhood classics):

Pickle Guys
At his store on Essex Street (once the center of the neighborhood pickle industry), Alan Kaufman makes pickles from "an old Eastern European recipe, just as my mom used to make them." At one point, he even got a chance to work with one of the owners of Guss' Pickles.

Rick's Picks
Founder Rick Field, a former TV producer, translated a childhood hobby into a business in 2004. His artisinal corn, beet, and green bean pickles are fancier and less traditional than Pickle Guys' or Guss', but they stem from family recipes and are a regular fixture at the annual International Pickle Festival on Orchard Street.

-posted by Liana Grey

Twilight Thursday Profile - Wendy Mink Jewelry

Shop managers participating in our Twilight Thursdays program, in which tickets for special evening tours double as coupons for local businesses, share their thoughts on the surrounding neighborhood.


Store manager Kelly Christy outside Wendy Mink Jewelry on Orchard between Broome and Grand. Photo courtesy of Google Images.

Wendy Mink likes the Lower East Side so much that she shuttered her jewelry store in the West Village a year and a half ago and moved it to Orchard Street. Most days, she's too busy designing earrings and bracelets alongside a team of Tibetan artisans in her TriBeCa studio to spend much time in the neighborhood. (Her work is inspired by travels to the Indian subcontinent and flea markets in Europe.)

But I spoke with one of the shop's managers, Kelly Christy, at the boutique just south of the museum. Her thoughts on the neighborhood: "It keeps changing, but it still has its heart and soul." Locals seem to accept its shifting nature, she said, and because "people who live here shop here" - particularly younger residents and teachers who work at nearby schools - its a good place to run a small business.

Kelly herself is a milliner, and has a studio in the back of the store. She sells some of her hats alongside Wendy's jewelry, and did the reverse when she ran a shop of her own (now shuttered) in TriBeCa. The two artists met through a mutual friend 19 years ago, not long after Wendy first launched her collection, and fast became buddies after taking a martial arts class together.

The economic climate has changed a lot since then - but Kelly ensured me that her longtime friend is doing well and "has a good following."

More info: Check out the store's new blog and Twitter page.

Opening & Closing - Hudson Street Papers

A look at small businesses in the Lower East Side that have shuttered, or are about to, and what's moving into the neighborhood to replace them.

If you've ever passed by Hudson Street Papers on Orchard Street between Stanton and Rivington, you might have wondered what the tiny stationary shop was doing outside the West Village. Turns out its owner moved it from across town a short while ago and shut the store down at the end of last month after realizing, as he told Curbed, that "the Lower East Side is bad news." The vacant space (once home to cards, stamps, and quirky items, like freezy freakie mittens - see a former customer's review) is for rent by Misrahi Realty, whose strip mall-like retail center under construction about a block away contributed, perhaps, to the owner's changing impression of the neighborhood.

-posted by Liana Grey

Neighborhood Tea Houses & Cafes

The Lebanon Club, New York working men's coffee house, 1880. Courtesy NYPL. (Click for larger image.)


Syrian coffee-house, by Jay Hambridge & engraved by Henry Davidson. NYC, August 1901. Courtesy NYPL. (Click for larger image.)

In his 1905 account of social life on the Lower East Side, journalist A.H. Fromenson wrote, "What saloons there are on the East Side do but an impoverished business and are dependent to a large extent upon the chance passerby."

However, he was quick to point out that social life thrived on the East Side--if not in beer saloons, but "coffee saloons." These cafes--totalling close to 300--offered places to discuss socialism, play chess, critique the theater, and listen to music. What united them was their elevation of tea as the social drink.

Tea was sometimes accompanied by lemon, or imbibed while clenching a sugar cube in the teeth. "And where the cigarette smoke is the thickest and the denunciation of the present forms of government loudest, there you find women!" In a neighborhood in which most women and men were crammed into tenements, to social spaces offered by cafes were all the more important.

Cafes also served as box-offices for local theater productions, as this 1899 poster diplays:


Courtesy NYPL. Click for larger image.

Partial translation reads: 'Bizet's world-famous opera will be performed for the first time [in Yiddish] with Miss Guttman as Carmen, Miss E. Siebert as Micaela, Miss Elkas as Frasquita, Mr. Cantari as Escamillo, Mr. Harti as Remendado, Mr. Steinhof as Zuniga, and Mr. M. E. Medvedieff as Don Jose. A special choir of 20 children, together with full chorus, orchestra, scenery, and costumes.

Tickets available at the box office, at Herrick Brothers, at Schinkman's Cafe, 126½ Canal Street, at Schmuckler's Cafe, 167 East Broadway, at Schreiber's Cafe, 256 Grand Street, and at Rosenberg's Sausage Store, 200 Broome Street. Children under five years of age positively not admitted.'

- Posted by Kate Stober, with special thanks to Annie Polland

Summer in the City - East River Park

When office manager Frances Pena was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, East River Park, not far from her apartment on Broome Street, was rundown and filled with vagrants. Once the city began to renew itself, starting when Frances' children were young, the esplanade became a bustling community hangout spot, with Little League tournaments, birthday celebrations, jungle gyms, and grassy picnic and sunbathing grounds.

Frances, who now lives in Queens, used to go running on a track alongside the FDR Drive at 5 am and would often run into familiar faces from the neighborhood. (It's a diverse crowd, with Hispanic and other relatively recent immigrants, as well as old-time European-Americans.)

The place gets so packed on the Fourth of July, Frances says, that people camp out the night before to secure one of several public grills or a spot to set up their own. One year Frances' family got to the park at 3 AM and hung around all day, catching the fireworks over the East River almost 20 hours later.

Left, Fourth of July Fireworks as viewed from East River Park. Right, the park's ballfield.

-posted by Liana Grey

Opening and Closing - How Business Are Faring on Orchard Street South of Delancey

Historic stores that are shuttering (or about to) and the businesses that are replacing them.

Decades old mom and pop shops are an endangered species in the Lower East Side, but even the high-end boutiques taking them over are struggling to survive. Neighborhood blog Bowery Boogie reports that Shop, a women's clothing store just across from the museum, shuttered less than a year after opening. The recession, coupled with the usual culprit, high rent, are probably to blame. On a more positive note, Orchard Street's restaurants, like Little Giant on the corner of Broome, which is always packed at lunchtime, seem to be thriving. And several of the neighborhood's historic lingerie shops, like A.W. Kaufman's, established in 1924 and run by the same family for three generations, are still open for business.



Owners of a trendy boutique closed their shop at 94 Orchard Street, but still exist online. Photo courtesy of Bowery Boogie.

-posted by Liana Grey

Summer in the City - Shakespeare in the Park(ing Lot)

Up in Central Park, Shakespeare's masterpieces are performed in a stadium surrounded by grass, trees, and the historic Belvedere Castle. Here in the Lower East Side, they're staged from July through August in ... the Municipal Parking Lot on Ludlow Street. Central Park may seem hard to beat, but the parking lot setting is gritty and low key, the performances (by a group of up-and-coming artists in the Drilling CompaNY) are probably edgy, and you don't have to wait in line for five hours to snag tickets. More info here.



Same playwright, different venues

-posted by Liana Grey

Summer in the City

The Lower East Side is a great place to take a stroll in the summertime. Grab an ice cream from an old-fashioned sidewalk cart (the vendors tend to hang around Clinton Street), and head down Essex Street to Seward Park, opened by the government in 1903 as a play space for children and named after the senator that purchased Alaska. And if it gets too hot, slip into an air-conditioned restaurant, boutique, or bookstore - a luxury 19th century New Yorkers didn't have. Museum staff will be sharing their favorite neighborhood activities this week.



Ice cream in New York, the beginning of last century and now. Seems like vendors’ uniforms haven’t changed much over the years.

-posted by Liana Grey

Mark Your Calendar - Egg Rolls and Egg Creams

Every year, the Museum at Eldridge Street hosts a street festival celebrating Chinese and Jewish culture. (The restored synagogue's home just north of the Manhattan Bridge, formerly a Jewish neighborhood, is now in the heart of Chinatown.) Head over to 12 Eldridge Street this Sunday for free food and entertainment, including live performances by Klezmer bands and a local Chinese orchestra. Details:

-posted by Liana Grey

National Historic Preservation Month

Every spring, the National Trust for Historic Preservation compiles a list of the country's 11 most endangered landmarks in hopes that more resources will be pooled towards their rescue. This year's roundup includes the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple in Illinois, and tiny, remote Lana'i City, Hawaii. The entire Lower East Side was featured in 2008. But thanks to the slowing real estate market and the efforts of preservationists like Tenement Museum founder Ruth Abram (who won a prestigious award last month for her work), the neighborhood’s risk of losing its historical integrity to new construction has declined. Check out some footage of current at-risk sites on YouTube.



A large corporate landowner in Lana'i City wants to demolish historic buildings to make way for commercial developments.



Lack of maintenance and plans for replacement have put the East Coast's oldest vertical lift bridge at risk.

Questions for Curatorial - Staying... and Leaving

Over the last few years, stricter immigration laws, the recession, and improved living conditions in countries like India, China, and Mexico have led to an exodus of both skilled workers and undocumented immigrants. Curatorial Director Dave describes migration patterns at the turn of the last century and what conditions were like for those that chose to remain in New York.

In what percentages did immigrants return to their homelands? Are there differences if looked at by time period and ethnicities?

Many immigrants came to America with the ultimate intention of returning to their home countries after earning enough money to buy land or houses. Between 1900 and 1920, 36 percent of immigrants arriving in the United States returned home. In turn-of-the-century New York, the degree to which Russian Jews became permanent settlers was remarkable. Escaping virulent anti-Semitism and political oppression, many emigrated with no intention of returning.

Nevertheless, many more went back than is ordinarily assumed. Between 1880 and 1900, 15 to 20 percent returned to their homes. After 1900, however, return migration dropped off as political upheaval and religious oppression intensified. In contrast to Russian Jews, the return rate among Italians reached 50 percent in some years—of every 10 Italians who left for the U.S. between 1880 and World War I, 5 returned home.

Sometimes called “birds of passage,” many of the first Italian immigrants were young men who came to America with the intention of earning enough money to return to Italy, buy land, and raise a family.

According to Nancy Foner, author of From Ellis Island to JFK: New York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration, “Italians called the United States ‘the workshop’; many arrived in March, April, and May and returned in October, November, and December, when layoffs were most numerous… For many Italian men, navigating freely between their villages and America became a way of life.” Nevertheless, many returnees or ritornati chose to re-migrate to the United States.

What is the source for the claim that the Lower East Side was the most densely populated place on earth at the turn of the last century?



Crowds on Hester Street

The source for the claim that the Lower East Side was the most densely populated place on earth at the turn of the last century comes from a housing survey conducted by the newly created Tenement House Department of New York City in 1903, charged with insuring the implementation of the Tenement House Act of 1901. The detailed survey found the Lower East Side’s 10th ward the most densely populated in the city and, indeed, the world.

In 1903, the ward had a total population of 69, 944 or approximately 665 people per acre. The most densely populated block in the ward, bounded by Orchard, Allen, Delancey, and Broome Streets, encompassed 2.04 acres and had a population density of 2,233 people per acre.

The extraordinary population density in the Tenth Ward and neighboring Lower East Side wards was caused by several factors. The major cause was the increasing population as incredible numbers of immigrants - largely Eastern European Jews and Italians - arrived in New York.

Immigrants initially settled on the Lower East Side because this was an area with affordable housing where immigrants were welcome by building owners. Members of particular ethnic or religious groups tended to cluster where their compatriots had already settled, leading to larger communities. Here people spoke their language and shared their customs. The religious and social institutions, and the commercial establishments that eased the transition to life in America, were already in existence.

Rebecca Lepkoff Photographs

Few things capture turn-of-the-century life on the Lower East Side better than art, which we'll explore in this week's series.

Born in the Lower East Side in 1916, photographer Rebecca Lepkoff kept her camera trained on the neighborhood for over six decades, charting its gradual shift from melting pot to hipster hot spot. Early in her career, Lepkoff joined the progressive (and eventually black-listed ) Photo League, a group of New York shutterbugs that captured, like the Ashcan artists decades before them, the gritty realities of urban street life. Her classic black and white snapshots of the el train, tenement buildings, and mothers with baby carriages are featured in the book Life On the Lower East Side, and were on display for a while at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in SoHo, where visitors could ask to see rare original prints. The gallery's collection still includes works by a number of famous 20th century New York artists, including Jacob Riis.






A Lepkoff photo from the 1940s. Baby carriages were as common a sight on New York's streets back then as they are now.