Lower East Side

Area; Fulton St. (South St. to Pearl St.) and Franklin St. (Baxter St. to Broadway)
on the south to 14th St. on the north; from the East River west to Pearl St. and
Broadway; excluding Chinatown. Map on page 111.

The dramatic, intensely human story of the Lower East Side is a fa-
miliar chapter in the epic of America; a host of writers—some seeking
out the Lower East Side and others originating there—have described its
people. Here have dwelt the people whose hands built the city's elevateds,
subways, tubes, bridges, and skyscrapers. Its two square miles of tenements
and crowded streets magnify all the problems and conflicts of big-city life.
The inhuman conditions of its slums and sweatshops brought about the
first organized social work in America. Crowded, noisy, squalid in many
of its aspects, no other section of the city is more typical of New York.

The district is best known as a slum, as a community of immigrants,
and as a ghetto; yet not all of the district is blighted, not all of its people
are of foreign stock, and not all are Jewish. From its dark tenements, gen-
erations of American workers of many different national origins and an
amazing number of public figures have emerged; politicians, artists, gang-
sters, composers, prize fighters, labor leaders.

One of the first New York tenements designed for multifamily use was
erected in the Lower East Side in 1833, on Water Street near Corlears
Hook. The most notorious "modern" slum, however, was Five Points—
centered at the intersection of Baxter, Worth, and Park Streets—flourish-
ing when Charles Dickens described it in 1842. The southern part of the
Lower East Side soon shared the conditions if not the notoriety of Five
Points and, thanks to potato rot, political oppression, and pogroms, the
northern part took on the same character, as the last great waves of the
"old immigration" and the first great waves of the "new immigration"
surged in. The overwhelming majority of the tenements still standing are
of the kind banned in 1901. Many antedate the Civil War, but most were
built in the 1880's and r89o's.

Two million Irish, fleeing famine, migrated to America between 1846
and 1860, and many of them settled, at least temporarily, in the Lower
East Side. It was the Lower East Side that produced Alfred E. Smith, four-
time Democratic governor of New York State, Democratic candidate for
President in 1928, and a founder of the American Liberty League; and
three of the best-known sachems of the originally anti-Irish Tammany