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east side
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jewish lower east side
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This is New
York's landmark historic Jewish neighborhood, which was once the world's
largest Jewish community. It was here that the New York garment industry
began. Today it is one of New York's favorite bargain beats, where serious
shoppers find fantastic bargains (especially along Orchard Street on a
Sunday afternoon), cutting-edge new designers, and hot bars and music
venues - and possibly the best place to get a great pastrami sandwich,
pickles out of a barrel, and the world's best bialys. Try Katz's
Delicatessen (205 East Houston St.), the oldest and largest real NY
deli, founded in 1888.
Bounded by Houston Street, Canal Street, and the FDR Drive, the
neighborhood's center is Orchard Street. Once a Jewish wholesale
enclave, this street is a true multicultural blend, with trendy boutiques,
French cafés, and velvet-roped nightspots sprinkled among dry-goods
discounters, Spanish bodegas, and mom-and-pop shops selling everything
from T-shirts to designer fashions to menorahs. Orchard is lined with
small shops purveying clothing and shoes at great prices. Grand, Orchard,
and Delancey Streets are treasure troves for linens, towels, and other
housewares, and the traditional Sunday street vendors (Saturday, the
Jewish Sabbath, is observed by many shopkeepers as a day of rest) offer
great opportunities to hone your bargaining skills! At Shapiro's Winery
visitors can taste one of their 32 flavors of wine, and at Streit's
bakery, matzoh mavens can sample the freshly baked unleavened bread as it
rolls off the conveyor belts behind the counter.
The Lower East Side
Tenement Museum interprets the area's immigrant and migrant
experiences through tours of a landmark 19th century tenement, living
history programs, neighborhood walking tours, plays, and special programs.
The first synagogue built by Eastern European Jews in America (1887) is
the Eldridge
Street Project, now a cultural center and gift shop.
View
an interactive map of the Lower East Side.
More information about the Lower East Side:
The Lower
East Side Business Improvement District has a visitor center at
261 Broome Street and can provide visitors with a shopping directory and
information on dining discounts, free parking, and walking tours.
The Lower
East Side Conservancy is a preservation organization that
specializes in tours of this fascinating neighborhood, visiting beautiful
and historic synagogues. |
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October
20, 2002
Fading Into History
By ALLEN SALKIN
"Lower East Side" (1900), collection of Lisa Ades,
Jewish Museum
LINDA Macfarlane, née Feuer, stood on East Houston Street and looked
stunned as she peered south at the sleek bistros and boutiques lining
Orchard Street. "It's all gone," she whispered to her husband as
she clutched his arm. "What happened?"
Ms. Macfarlane, 59, left New York more than 25 years ago. Now, on a recent
visit to the city, she wanted to show her husband the children's clothing
store where she had worked "selling shmattes" as a teenager. But
the store, whose name she cannot remember, is gone, as are most of the
landmarks and talismans in the neighborhood that was for generations the
traditional symbol of the American Jewish experience: the fabric
merchants, the ethnic food sellers, the children's furniture stores.
"I wanted to smell it, follow my nose, the food, the places,"
Ms. Macfarlane said wistfully, brushing her blond hair back from her eyes.
"But nothing smells the same anymore. The people, everything's gone.
The whole ghetto is gone."
Last month, Ratner's Delicatessen on Delancey Street sold its last onion
roll and closed after 97 years. Two years ago, the owners of Schapiro's
Kosher Winery on Rivington Street rolled their barrels out of the basement
and called it quits, selling the building for $2.3 million. Two weeks ago,
H&M Skullcap moved from its home on Hester Street, where it had
been for half a century, to 13th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn, a
thriving Jewish business thoroughfare. "The Chinese don't want to buy
yarmulkes," said Mendel Fefer, a salesman. Some of the remaining
small synagogues have so few members that they must import teenagers from
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to help make the minyan of 10 required for daily
prayers.
The long-contracting Jewish Lower East Side, the primal homeland for
American immigrant Jews, has lost so much of its cultural texture and so
many of its living touchstones that it may be time finally to pronounce it
dead. Yet paradoxically, even as the traditional neighborhood vanishes,
interest in its place in Jewish heritage is exploding, evidenced by the
packs of competing walking tours, a spate of new books about its history
and increased attendance at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
At its peak, around 1910, the square-mile area bounded by East Third
Street, the Bowery, Catherine Street and the East River was home to
373,057 people, a great majority of whom were Eastern European Jews. In
the 2000 census, the entire population was only 91,704, nearly half of
whom were of Asian descent. Only 17,200 were whites of non-Hispanic
descent.
Despite its changing ethnic and religious makeup, the Lower East Side is
hardly suffering economically. Shiny new shops, selling everything from
rubber miniskirts to $10 margaritas, have taken over storefronts and
brightened blocks that had been abandoned for decades. Clinton Street has
become a gourmet destination and Orchard Street a high-fashion strand. The
long-shuttered Sunshine Theater on East Houston Street, once a Yiddish
vaudeville house, is now a cinema. Moviegoers can fortify themselves with
refreshments from the venerable Yonah Schimmel Knishes next door.
Grand Street between Allen and Chrystie Streets bustles with Chinese shops
selling vegetables and seafood. Last month, Vanity Fair magazine published
a map showing local outposts of trendiness.
Despite such shifts, for countless American Jews like Ms. Macfarlane, the
area has remained almost a holy land in memory, an old country to return
to. The real old country — the cities, towns and shtetls of Europe —
has long since disappeared in clouds of war and genocide. But even as
recently as a few years ago, a person walking the streets of the Lower
East Side could sense the collective memory of a tangible past, helped
along by the few Jewish businesses that survived.
Two years ago, the area was designated a state and national historic
district. But such a designation does not freeze a neighborhood's
appearance and retard change the way landmark designation does.
As a result, what is being lost now are the last images that make it
possible to conjure the fantasy of the old days. And a few tenements where
Jews once lived, a couple of silver candlestick sellers, Russ &
Daughters smoked-fish emporium and Streit's matzo factory are not enough
to do the trick for people like Ms. Macfarlane or any of the other
mystified visitors seen daily on Orchard Street. To make the dream live,
they seem to need the taste of kosher corned beef (Katz's Delicatessen is
not kosher), the reek of pickles in brine and the Yiddish-inflected voices
of haggling merchants.
They crave the specters of a vanished culture, said Joyce Mendelsohn, who
teaches New York City history at the New School and leads walking tours
based on her guidebook, "The Lower East Side Remembered and
Revisited" (Lower East Side Press, 2001). "People got upset when
Ratner's closed," she said. "They feel an emotional, nostalgic
tie to the neighborhood, which is expressed in food in a large way. They
are running for the bialys, for the pickles. It's like the heart of the
Jewish experience they're hoping to go back to in some way."
Jewish or Not Jewish?
Some people say it is premature to announce the death of the Lower East
Side as a Jewish enclave. They point to the recent restoration of a
century-old mikvah (ritual bath) on East Broadway, the 270 children who
attend local yeshivas and the small synagogues that still dot the streets.
Kosher food is still available; Kossar's Bialys on Grand Street sells 500
dozen bialys a day, 30 percent of them to retail customers and the rest to
stores like Zabar's.
William Rapfogel, executive director of the Metropolitan Council on Jewish
Poverty, says his organization's statistics show that the number of Lower
East Side Jews has not changed much over the past decade.
"It may not be as religious, but it's still Jewish," said Debra
Engelmeyer, 32, whose family bought Kossar's from the company's founding
family four years ago.
But the district is feeling the effects of both an aging population and
real estate shifts that have transformed much of the city. Cooperative
Village, for example, a 4,500-apartment complex south of the Williamsburg
Bridge built as housing for union members, was for decades heavily
Orthodox Jewish. Starting in 1997, when restrictions on the selling price
of apartments were lifted, many residents began taking generous profits
and leaving. A fourth of the units have been sold. The management of the
complex says young Orthodox families are moving in, drawn by the
opportunity to knock down walls and create large apartments to house large
families. But real estate brokers who have handled sales at Cooperative
Village say the new buyers represent many different ethnicities.
Almost every night, Rabbi Schmuel Spiegel struggles to gather a minyan at
the First Roumanian-American Congregation on Rivington Street. One recent
evening, just before services were to start, Rabbi Spiegel had only five
men in his sanctuary. Hurrying out the door, he went to Orchard Street.
"You coming to shul?" he asked Sam Weiss, who sat outside his
men's shop.
"There's no one else to watch the store," Mr. Weiss replied.
The rabbi bounded into Altman's Luggage. "You're on your minyan
roundup?" asked Dan Bettinger, the shopkeeper. But he couldn't make
it, either.
Rabbi Spiegel tried Dolce Vita Shoes, and even stuck his head into a car
parked on Rivington Street because the driver was wearing a yarmulke. Ten
minutes later, he only had eight men, including a tourist from San Diego
named Al Krinick who had shown up because he had heard "they were
still davening" in the synagogue where his grandfather had prayed
more than half a century before. A phone call to Katz Furniture on Essex
Street yielded a father-and-son pair. Mission accomplished.
"Twenty years ago, you would have said there will never be a minyan
there in 20 years," Rabbi Spiegel said later. "But we're still
here. Ten years from now, I can't say."
Mythmaking and the Museum
While the Lower East Side may not be what it was, in fact, the
neighborhood as remembered, idealized and enshrined in popular culture
probably never existed.
The story of life in those precincts is achingly familiar: immigrants
jammed into hellish tenements, entire families laboring long hours for
meager wages in equally hellish sweatshops, rampant and devastating
disease. Most Jewish immigrants wanted nothing more than to get out.
"If it were still a poor neighborhood of Jews selling cheap clothes
and other things and struggling to survive, it wouldn't be iconic, it
would be a problem," said Hasia R. Diner, a professor of American
Jewish history at New York University and the author of "Lower East
Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America" (Princeton University
Press, 2000), a work exploring why the neighborhood has been remembered
fondly over the years. "It's only with the moving on, with the
passage of time, that that sort of stuff can be viewed as sweet and
lovely."
After World War II, and gaining urgency in the 1960's and 1970's with
books like Irving Howe's epic "World of Our Fathers," the Lower
East Side became an ever more powerful symbol of the bygone life of the
shtetl, where, as Ms. Diner put it, "families got along, neighbors
took care of each other and all the food tasted better."
That impulse is turning the Jewish Lower East Side into a museum piece.
Walking-tour guides point to where things used to be, not where they are.
The Forward building, home until 1974 of the Yiddish-language newspaper
that in the 1920's sold 250,000 copies a day, was converted into expensive
loft apartments. The Forsyth Street Synagogue is a Spanish-language
Seventh-day Adventist Church. The Garden Cafeteria, where Isaac Bashevis
Singer set his short story "The Cabalist of East Broadway," is a
Chinese restaurant.
"There is more of a future for tourism than there is for
Judaism," said Philip Schoenberg, who has led Jewish Lower East Side
Talk and Walk tours since 1992. "I have people who go on my tours,
and all I'm saying is: `This was once a kosher butcher shop. This was
this. This was once that.' "
In addition to the tours conducted by Mr. Schoenberg and Ms. Mendelsohn of
the New School, there are others led by the Tenement Museum (every
weekend) and Big Onion Walking Tours (which runs a Jewish Lower East Side
tour monthly). Ms. Mendelsohn, who books some of her tours through the
92nd Street Y, has been hired by the Lower East Side Conservancy to train
docents for tours of historic Lower East Side synagogues. In the last
year, more than 12,000 people have taken these tours.
As flesh-and-blood Jews leave, mythmaking becomes ever more powerful.
In 2000, the patch of Orchard Street in front of the Tenement Museum was
torn up and replaced by perfectly even rows of unchipped black
cobblestone, to give a period feel. The museum, which opened in 1988,
takes visitors from around the world into tiny, historically restored
apartments at 97 Orchard Street, where 7,000 people lived between 1863 and
the 1930's. Annual attendance has soared, from 18,000 in 1992 to 82,000 in
the fiscal year ending June 30.
Since 1986, a $10 million restoration has been under way at the Eldridge
Street Synagogue. These days, the spectacular stained-glass window on the
facade is clear enough for sunlight to flow into the 115-year-old
sanctuary. But this space, where 1,000 people once worshiped on the High
Holy Days, still needs work. Saturday morning services are held in a small
basement room.
Changes, Even in Little Shtetl
If a Jewish equivalent to Little Italy remains in Manhattan — Little
Shtetl, say — it is probably the two-block stretch of Essex Street
between East Broadway and Grand Street, where half a dozen stores carry
signs with Hebrew lettering. Yet even here, tides of change are apparent.
At No. 7, an 11-story luxury condominium is rising over neighboring
tenements. The sign promises "yards, roof terraces, fireplaces,
skyline views — 1,584 to 3,650 square feet from $825,000." At No.
11 Essex sits the building that until a year ago housed A1, a store that
sold Judaica.
Past a Chinese-run store selling cellphones and car parts, at No. 13, is
Motty Blumenthal's Judaica shop, named Z & A Kol Torah by his
parents, Zelig and Aliza, who opened it 50 years ago. "As long as
people come here, I'll stay," Mr. Blumenthal said. "It'll last
at least another 5 or 10 years."
At No. 17, next door to Chinese North Dumpling, is Essex Electronics. For
many of the store's 35 years, the area was a major destination for Israeli
tourists seeking discounted stereo equipment. "There used to be 20
shops here," said Chaim Loeb, the manager. "Now there are three
or four, but some people still come."
Above another storefront at No. 17 is a friendly ghost: the sign Ha-attikos
Judaica. The shop closed years ago, neighbors say, and the space is now an
apartment.
At No. 19 is Weinfeld Skull Caps, which has been at the same location for
70 years. Recent customers included Martin and Goldie Sosnick, a San
Francisco couple who were ordering 240 black suede yarmulkes for their
daughter's wedding. "It's nice to come to where the roots are
from," Ms. Sosnick said. But, she added, "it was disappointing
to come here wanting to eat in a kosher restaurant, and there wasn't one
here."
Soon Weinfeld's will be gone, too; one of the owners said he planned to
move the business to Brooklyn within the year, "to be in a Jewish
neighborhood."
No. 21 houses T & H Insurance, which has a Chinese-lettered sign,
and, until two months ago, Israel Wholesale Import, a Judaica shop, which
jumped to 23 Essex, displacing a Chinese printer. Also at No. 23 is
Hollywood Video, which sells Chinese-language videos; the sign identifies
the address as "23 Exsses St." And so it goes.
Qun Lei, a clerk at Shun Da Sign, a store at 25 Essex Street that
manufactures many of the Chinese-language signs that are installed when
the Hebrew signs come down, sees the block's future more clearly than its
past. "I think it's a Chinese neighborhood," said Ms. Lei, 33,
who emigrated from China a year ago and calls herself Maggie."
Ms. Lei hopes to save enough money so she and her family can leave the
neighborhood, unconsciously following the path trod by Jews of nearly a
century ago. "Uptown Manhattan is good," she said.
Looking at a Cloudy Future
Not every business that might speak to the real or imagined past is gone.
Streit's matzo bakery still makes unleavened bread for a national and
international market at the Rivington Street address where the company was
founded in 1925.
Russ & Daughters, the smoked-fish and caviar store, occupies the
same white-tiled East Houston Street shop where it has been since 1914.
Yonah Schimmel Knishes has survived, and Guss's Pickles has found a new
lease on life near the Tenement Museum. The owners of Noah's Ark, a kosher
restaurant in Teaneck, N.J., will open a branch on Grand Street by year's
end.
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the few merchants who has no intention of
moving is the area's last gravestone seller. "We own the building
here, and people know where we are," said Murray Silver, the
60-year-old owner of Silver Monuments on Stanton Street, a business dating
from the late 30's.
Still, gravestone sellers aside, what kind of real future does the Jewish
Lower East Side face? Is there enough left to make Jews feel they can find
a link to a Jewish past? Or has too much vanished?
"You can find it at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, you can find
it in walking tours," said Samuel Norich, general manager of the
Forward Association, which publishes weekly Jewish newspapers in Yiddish,
Russian and English from its home on East 33rd Street. "There are
enough remnants of Jewish life on the Lower East Side and life going on
now that you can build on and conjure up what used to be there.
"In words at least."
Most evenings, Rabbi Schmuel Spiegel roams the streets
outside the First Roumanian-American Congregation in search of a minyan,
the 10 men required for daily prayers.
Schapiro's Kosher Winery sold its building and left two
years ago.
Copyright The New York Times Company
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Jewish-American History - Uprising on
the Lower East Side, 1909
On November 22, 1909, thousands of workers,
mostly young, Jewish, and female,gathered at Cooper Hall in New York City
for a meeting that would initiate a new chapter in American labor history
and in the role of Jewish immigrants in American society. The meeting had
been called by Local 25 of the struggling International Ladies’ Garment
Workers Union, looking to reinvigorate their degenerating strikes at the
Triangle Shirtwaist Company and the Leiserson Company by calling a general
strike of the entire New York shirtwaist (ladies’ blouse) industry, then
becoming one of the largest segment of the largely Jewish New York garment
industry. The general strike called that night would become known as
“The Uprising of 20,000” and would drastically change the role of
women and Jews in American labor politics over the next several decades.
The American garment industry itself had
developed simultaneously with the waves of East European Jewish
immigration between 1880 and 1920, offering numerous opportunities for
work and advancement to the newly arrived immigrants. Advances in
technology, industrial organization, and transportation made the
mass-production of affordable clothing possible, which was in turn met
with an increased demand for new fashions and styles, especially in
women’s clothing. To meet this demand and increase their profitability,
manufacturers developed a system of subcontractors, sweatshops, and home
work, relying on the availability of cheap immigrant and female labor to
fill their orders. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU)
was formed in 1900, under the auspices of the American Federation of Labor
(AFL) and the United Hebrew Trades (UHT), to represent and protect the
workers in the ladies’ garment trades, including makers of dresses,
hats, blouses, and jackets. For the first several years of its existence,
the ILGWU barely survived, and even considered disbanding in 1908. Local
25, which represented shirtwaist makers in New York City and whose failing
strikes the meeting at Cooper Hall had been called to discuss, numbered
only 100 members on the eve of the Uprising. The low membership numbers
and marginal survival of the union was due to several factors. The first
several years of the 20th century were hard hit by recession, making it
difficult for unions to make demands that could be met by the employers.
More importantly, perhaps, was the general attitude of labor organizers of
the time towards women and Jews. The recent Jewish immigrants were seen by
many unions as a threat to the job security of their workers, as they were
seen as a source of cheaper and more easily controlled labor by the
bosses. They were also victims of more general anti-Semitic and
anti-immigrant prejudices, speaking a strange
language, dressing differently, and practicing a “foreign” religion.
Women were also maligned by the unions, for similar reasons: they were
typically paid less then men and so threatened to take jobs away from male
laborers. Also, women were not considered a “good investment” of labor
organizers’ time and efforts, as many worked in factories and shops only
until they were married and had children, at which point most women
workers withdrew from public labor, instead taking on the kinds of work
that they could do at home: laundry washing, taking in boarders, and
finishing garments parceled out by the manufacturers for home work.
When Local 25 called its meeting, then, few
in the labor movement were prepared to take the demands of ladies’
garment workers seriously, despite the fact that they made up over 80% of
the workforce (75% of whom were also Jewish). Debate went on for hours,
with the mostly-male union leadership endorsing a strategy of patience and
negotiation against the workers’ demands for a general strike. The
meeting seemed destined to result in a stalemate when a teenage worker
named Clara Lemlich, active in Local 25 and considered a troublemaker by
many, took the stage. “I am a working girl, one of those striking
against intolerable conditions,” she announced in Yiddish. “I am tired
of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is
to decide whether or not to strike. I offer a resolution that a general
strike be declared--now!”
The response of the crowd was tremendous,
and Lemlich’s resolution was quickly seconded. The union leadership was
entirely unprepared for the massive response in the garment trades. 20,000
workers,or more, left their shops and joined the pickets. Relief centers
were hastily set up to support the striking workers, most of whom were
women. Union leaders gained a new-found appreciation of the capacities of
women picketeers, as women were beaten by police and “gorillas”(thugs
hired by the employers to menace the strikers) yet returned to the pickets
once they were freed from jail and their wounds had healed. The strike ran
through the winter until mid-February, when it was settled with a reduced
work-week (52 hours) and some improvement of conditions, but without the
union recognition that the workers had hoped for. The resolution of the
strike was considered a defeat by many of the workers at the time, but
laid the foundations for future victories. Local 25 emerged from the
strike with a membership of 10,000--the first Local in the country to
amass such high membership rolls. Inspired by the success of this largely
unplanned and unprepared strike, the mostly-male Cloakmakers’ Union went
out on strike later in the year, with 60,000 workers leaving their shops
and bringing the garment industry to a virtual standstill. This strike was
resolved with the industry-wide “Protocol of Peace”, which outlined a
system of union-employer relations that greatly increased the
accountability of the bosses to their employees (though, as is always the
case in American labor history, it was never enough...). Most importantly,
the Uprising of 20,000 established the importance of Jews and women--and
particularly Jewish women--to the labor movement. Though they still had to
struggle to control the conditions of their resistance (as with the
conditions of their labor), women and Jews could no longer be ignored by
any union claiming to represent the worker.
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NoHo
History
In
1748, what is now Lafayette and Astor Place, was New York’s first
botanical garden, established by a Swiss physician, Jacob Sperry, who
farmed flowers and hothouse plants. A mile from what was then the edge of
the city, Sperry's gardens became the destination of weekend strollers up
Broad Way from Wall St and the City’s Common (at Chambers St.).
Fifty-six years later, Sperry sold his gardens to John Jacob Astor, who
then leased the property to a Frenchman named Delacroix. Delacroix
transformed Sperry's property into the fashionable Vauxhall Garden, where
New Yorkers could also eat, drink, socialize, and be entertained by band
music and, in the evenings, by fireworks and theatrical events.
But,
by 1825, with real estate values skyrocketing on nearby Bond, Bleecker,
and Great Jones streets, Astor cut a broad street reducing the garden to
half its size, when Delacroix’s lease was up. This created
Lafayette Place, christened by the Marquis de Lafayette himself on his
last visit to New York in July of 1825, from a platform raised at the
corner of Great Jones and Lafayette. (Visit Historic
Districts Council for background on efforts to Landmark these very
blocks) Astor realized a great
profit for the lots on Lafayette Place, named La Grange Terrace
after Lafayette’s country home in France. The four northernmost
“mansions” remain as Colonnade Row.
The five southern most houses were
destroyed in 1902 to make way for an annex to Wanamaker’s Department
Store.
What is now Washington Square Park (two blocks from the current northern
portion of NoHo) functioned, from the early 1780s, as an eight acre
potter’s field and public gallows. But, the comparative seclusion
of the area began to erode when outbreaks of yellow fever and cholera
ravaged the core city to the south at City Hall, in 1799, 1803, 1805, and
1821 and those seeking refuge fled north to the
wholesome backwaters of the West Village. The population increased
fourfold between 1825 and 1840. More shrewd speculators, like Astor,
subdivided farms, leveled hills, rerouted Minetta Brook, and undertook
landfill projects. In addition to the fashionable Astor Place, Washington
Square Park, still a potter’s field in1826, at the foot of Fifth Avenue,
became a military parade grounds and a spacious pedestrian commons.
On the perimeter of Washington Square, stately red brick townhouses built
in Greek Revival style drew wealthy members of society. The crowning
addition to this urban plaza was the triumphal marble arch designed by
Stanford White, erected in 1892.
The
University of the City of New York (now New York University), established
itself on the northeastern corner of Washington Square in a building
completed in 1837. At the time it was a nondenominational, private
university, established in 1831 by Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed
ministers in response to the conservative curriculum and Episcopalian
control of Columbia College. The original building stood at this site
until 1894.
As
this transpired, a wave of revolutions convulsing Europe precipitated a
growing American disdain for monarchies, fueling tensions between
working-class immigrants. The Astor Place Opera House, on the present site
of the District 65 Building (UAW), became the site of the Astor Riot on
May 10 1849, when vitriol
between British thespian W.C. Macready, American actor Edwin Forrest and
Sixth Ward Boss Isiah Rynders, a knife-fighting, English-hating Tammany
politician, inspired anti-English mobs who stormed the Theater in the
second act of MacBeth setting it on fire.
The disturbance brought out the militia and the police, who killed 22
(more by some accounts) and wounded 48; some 50 to 70 policemen were
injured. .
Cooper
Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, a private tuition-free
college provided by Peter Cooper to educate workers, opened in Astor Place
in 1859, having also incorporated the Female School of Design founded to
provide women with an alternative to menial labor. Public debates,
lectures and speeches were held in the Great Hall, not the least of which
was one delivered by Abraham Lincoln in 1860.
In
the aftermath of the Draft Riots of 1863, when Irish immigrants fearing
their jobs would be taken by Black laborers if they were conscripted to
fight in the Civil War, and during which 11 Black men were murdered with
horrid brutality, the southeastern edge of the Village (NoHo and Nolita))
became “little Africa..
In the late 1800s to early 1900s the East Village (NoHo's
neighbor to the east) grew as the working class marched northward from the
South St. Seaport (post Revolutionary War) and the Lower East Side (Civil
War). This area pioneered social services including still extant
institutions: Boys Club Headquarters (founded in 1876 1901) and a
Young Women's Settlement House (1897). These institutions for
immigrants and poor Americans provided free birth control, educational
classes, libraries, and dental and health services. From the1850s the area
north of Houston and east of Bowery was called Kleindeutschland for the
throngs of German immigrants who lived in its tenements and worked the
ironworks, piano factories, gas works and breweries south of 14th
St. When these immigrants moved to Yorkville, it became
“Bohemia” accommodating Eastern Europeans. Hundreds of tenement
apartments became cigar factories; storefronts showcased milliners and
cobblers, cabinetmakers and upholsterers.
Throughout,
greater Greenwich Village steadfastly marched to its diverse destiny as
the spiritual, educational, and cultural avant guarde of the City. It's
sub neighborhoods-- NoHo, SoViLa, East Village, West Village--became the
site of art clubs, private picture galleries, learned societies, literary
salons, theaters and libraries. Interspersed in this fabric, fine
hotels and shopping emporia also proliferated through the 1860’s.
As the poor and working class poured into the East Village, older
residences were subdivided into cheap lodging hotels and multiple-family
dwellings, or demolished for higher-density tenements. Plummeting real
estate values prompted nervous retailers and genteel property along the
Village’s Broadway corridor to move north to Union Square.
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