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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
The Physical Landscape
The physical landscape of the Lower East Side changed as fast as
its ethnic composition. The wooden buildings and dirt streets passed
with the American-born residents. In the 1850s and 1860s, five-and
six-story brick and stone tenements were built in large numbers
to accommodate poor immigrants in search of cheap housing. Omnibus
horse lines traversed the neighborhood carrying passengers between
uptown and downtown, and east and west.
"Dumb-bell" (after 1879) and "new law" (after
1901) tenements rose in successive waves amidst older housing stock,
like 97 Orchard Street. More and more immigrants piled into the
tenements and the streets were crowded with people buying and selling
everything imaginable. In the neighborhood, elevated railways began
to rumble over Allen Street to First Avenue, as well as the Bowery
around 1880.
Factories produced garments, furniture, and carpets, making use
of steam power and cheap labor. Early in the twentieth century a
new ethnic shopping and entertainment district took root in the
neighborhood, offering vaudeville shows, nickelodeons, and movie
theaters.
The Brooklyn Bridge opened on May 24, 1883, instantly becoming the
longest bridge in the world. As the first bridge connecting the
cities of Brooklyn and New York (Manhattan), it offered a cheap
alternative to the ferries that daily carried men back and forth
between their homes and workplaces. It was also built largely by
immigrant workers, many of whom lived on the Lower East Side. When
the Brooklyn Elevated to Fulton Ferry was completed in 1885, providing
easy access to the interior of Brooklyn, traffic on the Bridge more
than doubled, so that by 1885 it was handling some 20 million passengers
a year. For this reason, it undoubtedly aided the exodus of those
immigrants and children of immigrants able to afford homes in Brooklyn
and the daily commute by street car into the city. While the dispersal
of the Lower East Side's German and Irish immigrant communities
was already well underway, the opening the Brooklyn bridge likely
hastened their exodus. But 25 years after it opened, the Lower East
Side reached its peak population density.
Built in 1903, the Williamsburg Bridge had a greater effect on the
ability of immigrants to leave the Lower East Side. In the early
20th century, the bridge was seen as a passageway to a new life
in Williamsburg, Brooklyn by thousands of Jewish immigrants fleeing
the overcrowded neighborhood.
Even more important was the inauguration of the subway in 1904,
whose extension over the next several decades allowed for the further
decentralization of the city by making rapid transportation accessible
to the working-class New Yorker. Once subway lines had been extended
to places like Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn, these
areas became second Lower East Sides-immigrant neighborhoods that
provided homes, workplaces, and communities to thousands of new
Americans.
The Lower East Side's population peaked in 1910 with nearly 550,000
people living there. It contained some of the highest population
densities in the world. In fact, if all of New York had been as
densely populated as the most crowed blocks of the Lower East Side,
the city's population would have been greater than the population
of the United States. According to Tenement Department inspectors,
the most crowded block in New York in 1903 housed over 2,200 residents,
and was bounded by Orchard, Allen, Delancey, and Broome Streets
wherein lay 97 Orchard Street.
Height regulations were first placed on buildings in New York City
by the 1916 Zoning Resolution. As the first comprehensive effort
at regulating the height, area, and use of structures built in an
urban environment, the resolution proved influential to other U.S.
cities that enacted zoning legislation after 1916.
While the 1916 Zoning Regulation was in a sense formulated as a
reaction to the ways in which a new building form, the "skyscraper,"
blocked sunlight to the surrounding streets, resulting in the setback,
pyramid-style designs typical of New York City high-rises, it applied
to the entire city. Neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side were
divided into height districts where limitations were formulated
in relation to the width of the street. The Lower East Side was
deemed a 1½ times district, meaning that no building was
to be erected to a height in excess of 1½ times the width
of the street. However, for each foot that the building or a portion
of it was set back from the street line, three feet could be added
to the height limit of the structure. Although many of the tenements
on the Lower East Side were erected prior to 1916, the height of
those constructed after were subject to the limitations imposed
by the 1916 Zoning Resolution.
The population density of the neighborhood declined in the 1920s
and 1930s. This was partly due to the demolition of old tenements
in order to widen streets such as Delancey and Allen, and construct
parks, schools, and approaches to the Williamsburg and Manhattan
bridges. Many Lower East Side residents literally walked across
the bridges to Brooklyn. In addition, the City's twentieth-century
transportation system - a combination of elevated trains and subways
- eliminated distance and the rivers as barriers for jobs. The cheap
fares and speed of this system made it possible for immigrants to
live in the Bronx and still work in Lower Manhattan.
In the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia's slum clearance efforts
also demolished hundreds of buildings in the neighborhood, creating
a shortage of low rental units. With new immigration drastically
reduced, the area failed to repopulate itself. Despite the population
loss, however, the Lower East Side remained New York's most densely
populated neighborhood until 1935, when it was surpassed by East
Harlem. And many of the streets remained very crowded during the
day with pushcarts and peddlers still selling their wares.
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