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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
Continuity and Change following World War
II
Following the Second World War the elevated train lines above Allen
St, First Avenue, and Third Avenue were taken down as the city's
transportation system came to rely exclusively on the subway and
buses. Parts of the neighborhood changed significantly in the 1960s
as the "East Village" developed into New York's counter-culture
mecca and "Little Italy" became one of New York's best-known
tourist attractions, even though its Italian residents have for
the most part departed. The Chinese ideograms visible today on the
side streets off Mulberry - the heart of the old Little Italy -
attest to the changing ethnic composition of the neighborhood.
Europe has been replaced by East Asia and the Caribbean Basin as
the major source of the Lower East Side's, and America's immigrants.
Sixty-two percent of the 34,000 documented immigrants living in
the neighborhood are from China, 14 percent from the Dominican Republic,
and another 2 percent from the Philippines. Immigrants from Bangladesh
and Ecuador follow with 1.45 percent and .9 percent respectively.
In addition, there are more than 37,000 Puerto Ricans (not classified
as immigrants) living in the area.
Despite the physical and ethnic evolution of the neighborhood, elements
of life on the Lower East Side continue in very much the same pattern
as they did 125 years ago. The basic housing stock remains the tenement
on a 25 ft. x 100 ft. lot, which continues to accommodate households
as large as those reported in the 1880 or 1930 federal censuses.
The German and Russian Jewish brass-fitters' shops along Broome
Street in the 1880s were first superseded by Italian ironmongers,
and now by immigrant Chinese workers fashioning security gates and
etched glass windows for homes and restaurants in the area. Sweatshops
producing garments persist despite the change in ethnicity or race
of those who work in them. Orchard Street is still filled with bargain
hunters on Sundays when the street is closed to cars, tropical fruit
stalls and live fish tanks clog pedestrian traffic on the Grand
and Essex Street sidewalks, older people gesticulate and teenagers
huddle in alternate doorways along Ludlow or Eldridge streets. Most
local residents today could echo the reminiscence of one 1920s immigrant
that she "had made the trip to Bialystok or Warsaw from her
shtetl a lot more often than she now did Times Square."
Kenneth Jackson, "The Lower East Side Statement of Significance"
(fourth draft. 12/15/93); Stanley Nadel, Little Germany: Ethnicity,
Religion and Class in New York City, 1845-1880 (Chicago, 1990).
See also: Immigration; Germans;
Irish; Italians;
Jews; Chinese;
Puerto Ricans; Housing.
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