New East Side story shares ties to its past
Today’s sense of creativity and hipster pretension evolved from a rich history of immigrant tenements
NEW YORK— It’s easy to forget that this city is a palimpsest, forever erasing and reconceiving itself. The brash confidence of the city creates a false impression of constancy: Manhattan can seem to a traveller like an island fixed in the eternal present.
For example, few people gawking at the sideshow of Times Square realize that less than two decades ago this was a haven of hard drugs and prostitution. In a coup of urban rehab, former mayor Rudolph Giuliani turned an addict into a pop star.
Asimilar thing can be said for the Lower East Side. Walk through its streets today and the impression is likely to be favourable.
You will note the profusion of sparsely stocked designer shops with names such as Live Fast and Everybody’s Going to Heaven.
You will witness a gelateria dressed as a laboratory (Il Laboratorio del Gelato); a punk/metal karaoke bar dressed as a supermarket (Arlene’s Grocery); and a shop that sells nothing but its namesake, Stuffed Artisan Cannolis. The toy company on Norfolk Street will turn out to be a pseudo-speakeasy serving cocktails in white teacups (The Back Room).
Furthermore, it will be perfectly normal to wait 40 minutes to eat brioche in Clinton Street Bakery, or have lines shaved into your “mop” by a stylist going by the name of Flame Hair (Pimps and Pinups). Economy Candy will overwhelm the most ardent of sweet-tooths, driven from the street by a stench of rotting garbage. Everything seems derelict yet carefully curated, down to a neon sign in an apartment window advising Essex Street pedestrians to “Never Sleep”.
This is the snapshot I develop after several weeks of living on the Lower East Side, a place of playful creativity and hipster pretension. Yet it is only that — a snapshot — as partial an idea of the neighborhood as the one that Times Square projects about itself on strobing billboards.
According to novelist Nathaniel Rich, for example, before the “slick paradise of Avenue C wine bars and Ludlow Street fashion boutiques”, the Lower East Side could be characterised as “a wanton, crack-de- pleted borderland filled with burning trash cans and random knifings.” And this is only the most recent and conspicuous layer beneath its current patina of cool.
In an effort to move beyond the surface to see the Lower East Side in all its iterations since the 19th century, I join two daily tours for the public.
New York has become very good at demolishing its heritage, which is why the Tenement Museum is such a notable accomplishment. Tucked away on the fringes of Chinatown, deep in the Lower East Side, its single apartment block at 97 Orchard St. stands as a testament to unappreciated immigrant history. For more than two decades, cofounders Ruth Abrams and Anita Jacobson have meticulously restored six apartments to different eras since the building’s construction in 1863.
For example, a tour called “The Moores: An Irish Family in America” takes visitors to the fourth floor and 1869, where the Moores’ restored home contrasts the IrishCatholic struggle with that of the Katz’s, Russian-Jewish immigrants who lived here in the 1930s.
More on the Jewish experience can be found one floor down in “Piecing It Together,” a tour examining the garment trade at the turn of the 20th century when the Lower East Side was the most densely populated place on Earth.
I climb to the second floor, where “Getting By” introduces me to two families and two different depressions: the German-Jewish Gumpertz family, living through the Panic of 1873; and the Italian-Cath- olic Baldizzis, who weathered the Great Depression of the 1920s. Before postmodern wine bars and gourmet bodegas catering to the upwardly mobile, this was the reality: an evolving immigrant neighborhood where coal dust once caked lung and living space alike. Over the course of an hour, our guide charts the turbulent terrain of Lower East Side history, grounding it in tales of people seeking that fabled “land of the free.” These apartments are uncanny recreations of specific moments: a dressmaker’s quarters from the 1870s gives way to an Italian kitchen from 50 years later, opera music wafting over hair pomade and an abandoned game of rummy beside the radiator. With each space a heavily-researched set piece; to walk through the museum is to walk, snapshot by snapshot, into the building’s oldest incarnations. Another tour, “Immigrant Soles,” takes this concept outside, our guide now isolating old fragments from the noise of traffic. Although the contemporary Low- er East Side is generally agreed to begin south of East Houston Street, until recently (and for some, still today) it also referred to the East Village and Alphabet City all the way to 14th Street. Walking around the neighborhood and hearing of its past, I discover Allen Street, an industrial boulevard, has its elevated train again; a nondescript alley cluttered with Chinese vendors springs opens to reveal a forgotten Moorish synagogue. From Jarmulowsky Bank to a communist newspaper building transformed into milliondollar condos, the Lower East Side is revealed in all its color and multicultural attire. The tour ends at an abandoned picture palace, its back alley zigzagged with a perilous fire escape and psychedelic murals. But interested parties can find the thread again in the street photography of Weiwei, a Chinese artist periodically incarcerated by the Communist Party for his political criticisms. Weiwei lived on the Lower East Side in the 1970s and ’80s. His photographs show an assertive neo-bohemian community thriving in tableaux of squalid buildings, HIV/ AIDS protests and drag queens.
If all that sounds familiar, that’s because Jonathan Larson’s musical, Rent, is the final bridge to the present, a ground-breaking depiction of Alphabet City artists as they confront the savage disease and economic hardship in the 1990s.
Newly revived in an Off-Broadway production, watching it today is a curious experience. When the artists wonder how they’re going to pay the rent, you can almost hear the audience prophesying a mass migration to Brooklyn.
Indeed, property development seems less a spectral threat and more an inevitability, given all that’s happened since it premiered in 1996. Rent is both historical record and a death knell, celebrating bohemia with slick production values and, in the process, contributing to the sort of “derelict chic” that’s taken hold of the area from Alphabet City to the Lower East Side today.
Never mind, this is New York: tenants may change but that hardly means the story’s over. Understanding the past only makes its future all the more intriguing, another snapshot developing in place of the current one. Lance Richardson is a freelance writer based in New York. His trip was subsidized by NYC and Company.