Essay on Lower East Side 1890-1920

The Lower East Side was the center of Jewish immigrant life in New York from the 1880’s until the advent of WW1. Streets like Orchard and Hester stretched for blocks filled with peddlers with packs and stalls selling everything from carp, pickles, and dried fruit to bandannas, suspenders, and tin cups. Above the swirling noisy crowds were six-story dark, airless tenements ("great prison-like structures of brick") whose overcrowded apartments sometimes doubled as shops in which women did garment piecework.

It was a picturesque and intellectually intense world filled with Yiddish theatres, newspapers, political groups and ideological debates, but also a world where crime, poverty, and disease were common (Moses, 1977). By 1916, however, many of the Jews had begun to move to other sections of the city like Harlem, Brownsville, and the East Bronx. The Lower East Side was no longer the centre of Jewish culture in New York (Moses, 1977).

In 1998 there are still many Jews in 28 middle income co-operative apartment buildings on Grand Street (from Essex Street to the East River), and there are a number of synagogues left on East Broadway. But just as the Jews and Italians replaced the Irish in the 19th century, the dominant immigrant groups are now Hispanics and Chinese, and the area is dotted with bodegas and Pentecostal churches, and cheap Cantonese and Fukienese restaurants (Moses, 1977). In fact, a number of the Orchard Street bargain clothing stores are now owned by Chinese and East Indians.

This migration between 1881 and 1914 was one of the greatest adventures in Jewish history. By 1890 the Jewish population of the United States was 450,000; by 1900, more than a million; by 1910, more than two million; by 1920, thanks to natural increase but also the great crescendo of immigration just before it was cut off, 3.6 million. In the space of fifty years, Jews had risen from 0.52 to 3.41 per cent of the American population (Roy, 1962)................

ESSAY ON THE AMERICAS