Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of the Lower East Side, a neighborhood in Manhattan that was a center of Jewish immigrant culture in the 20th century.
Lower East Side
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Culture Family History Seen Through Tenement Rooms
The Archaeology of Home: An Epic Set On A Thousand Square Feet of The Lower East Side By Katharine Greider Public Affairs, 352 pages, $27 By the beginning of the 20th century, the Lower East Side of Manhattan was the most crowded neighborhood on earth, more densely populated than Calcutta. At the Tenement Museum on…
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Food Legendary New York Bialy Shop To Close
The oldest bialy store in Brooklyn, and perhaps all of New York City, will soon close its doors. The long-lived Coney Island Bialys and Bagels, which has been in operation since 1920, is calling it quits. Proprietor and baker Steven Ross said his 91-year old company was a victim of the economic downturn and the…
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News Fate Has Been Kind to Little Shul on Stanton Street
Just the other day, my friend Molly and I traveled back in time. No, we didn?t ingest any foreign substances or don a funny pair of 3-D goggles. We attended synagogue ? Congregation Bnai Jacob Anshei Brzezan. Or, to call it by its American name, the Stanton Street Shul. Built in 1913 on a narrow…
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The Schmooze Q&A: Photographer Annie Ling on the Residents of 81 Bowery
Annie Ling The fourth floor of 81 Bowery, in New York’s Chinatown, is composed of narrow, ceiling-less cubicles that some 35 Chinese immigrants call home. After reading a Village Voice feature on the residence, photographer Annie Ling was inspired to capture the space and the hard-working men and women who inhabit it. The result was…
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The Schmooze Hipsters and History on the Lower East Side
Crossposted From Under the Fig Tree Traipsing around the Lower East Side on a beastly hot summer day, I had lots of company. The streets were filled with tourists, shoppers and the cool cats who now call that downtown neighborhood their home. Most visitors, I suspect, were in search of the fabled hipster haven that…
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Food A Virtual Taste of the Lower East Side
“Take a big deep breath, smell that pickle-ness, because 100 years ago this is what the Lower East Side would have smelled like,” Sarah Lohman, of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum said recently. Lohman was leading the museum’s newest walking tour “The Taste of the Lower East Side.” Tour-goers learned about the various cuisines…
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Food Future of Legendary Essex Street Market Uncertain
A gastronomic fixture of the Lower East Side for seventy-one years, the Essex Street Market faces a precarious future. Recently approved guidelines for the nearby Seward Park Urban Renewal Area development project include the possibility of demolishing the current market in favor of a larger, more modernized facility at a new, still undetermined, location. In…
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Food Schav Returns to Greenmarkets This Spring
One sure sign of spring in my Brooklyn neighborhood is the first sighting of the Mr. Softee truck. A hundred years ago, Jewish residents of the Lower East Side knew it was spring by the appearance of sorrel, or schav in Yiddish, on the neighborhood pushcarts. While the pushcarts are gone, nowadays you can find…
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