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Lower East Side
Contents
Development as an Immigrant Neighborhood >
The Immigrants > The Physical Landscape > Continuity and Change
following World War II > Gangs on the Lower East Side > Orchard
Street Shopping: From Pushcars to Discount Clothing to Fashion Boutiques
Development as an Immigrant Neighborhood
The Lower East Side - in its fullest form an area stretching from
Fourteenth Street to Chambers Street between the Bowery and the
East River - is America's most famous immigrant neighborhood (see
Map 4). When the Dutch first arrived on Manhattan Island they divided
the land in the area of what we now call the Lower East Side into
eight farms. In the eighteenth century, Lieutenant Governor James
De Lancey purchased.
More than three-hundred acres in the area and tried to develop the
land - then on the edge of the city - as a residential district.
But after the American Revolution, De Lancey's lands were confiscated
(he had supported the British) and distributed among a number of
New Yorkers interested in development.
By the 1830s, American-born workers primarily populated the neighborhood,
though open tracts of land remained. Wooden, two- and three-story
single-family homes, that sometimes sheltered small shops or factories,
lined streets that were sometimes paved with cobblestones others
were merely dirt. Although there appears to be no exact date recorded
for the paving of the Orchard Street block bounded by Delancey and
Broome, paving stones likely replaced dirt sometime in the 1850s
or 1860s. During the mid-19th century, experiments were undertaken
with different paving materials, including macadam, woodblocks,
and cut stone blocks. Rectangular, granite paving stones called
Belgian blocks made of trap stone became widespread in some areas
of the city in 1852, replacing common round cobblestones. According
to extant prints from the period, gas-fired street lamps could be
seen on street corners by the 1860s as well.
Even in its earliest days, the neighborhood had a mixture of uses.
Indeed, 57 percent of New York's manufacturing establishments were
located in the area and large shipyards and slaughterhouses lined
the district's East River boundary.
Among the American-born whites living and working here, however,
were sizable pockets of immigrants and other "minorities."
Irish immigrants and African Americans each made up about 20 percent
of the population as early as 1820. They clustered in and around
the "Five Points," a notorious neighborhood located at
the intersection of Chatham, Pearl, and Baxter Streets. Today the
intersection is located right behind Manhattan's Federal Courthouse.
Five Points was depressed both physically (it was built of swampy
ground) and financially, so the rents here were cheap.
Immigrants and working-class laborers sought low rents because of
their poverty and their desire to save money for the trans-Atlantic
passages of relatives still to come. They also needed to live near
their jobs, since the long hours they worked made commuting a burden.
In nineteenth and early-twentieth-century New York, the highest
concentration of jobs, and especially unskilled jobs, was located
on the southern tip of Manhattan Island. With its relatively low
rents and close proximity to jobs, the Lower East Side was the perfect
place for newly arrived immigrants to settle.
Once established, immigrant neighborhoods served as buffer zones
between the Old World and the New. Immigrants sought others from
their homelands who could offer them advice on getting and succeeding
at jobs, finding housing, learning the English Language, and dealing
with them from their homelands stood out less in neighborhoods.
Thus, the Lower East Side and immigrant neighborhoods like it served
as gateways to the American experience. Immigrants came to the Lower
East Side by the millions during the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. And many are still coming today.
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