Lower East Side, New York City

LOWER EAST SIDE, NEW YORK CITY. The area of Manhattan known as the Lower East Side was one of the original geopolitical centers of the American Left. Bordered roughly by the East River and Broadway, Fourteenth Street and the Brooklyn Bridge, it has encompassed a range of neighborhoods with shifting borders and names, from the Gas Light District to the East Village; Little Italy and NoLita; Five Points and Chinatown; Alphabet City and Loisaida. At the turn of the twentieth century it was one of the most densely populated areas in the world, home to wave after wave of immigrants who lived, worked, and struggled to survive in its tenements. Often scorned as home of the unwashed, unruly, and un-American, the Lower East Side was a center for working class politics and culture, where communities mobilized for labor rights and decent housing, forged vibrant cultural lives, and pursued visions of socialism, communism, anarchism, and other forms of immigrant radicalism.

The Lower East Side’s proximity to points of entry to Manhattan Island made it a continual destination for a range of ethnically diverse newcomers. The earliest histories of the Lower East Side include indigenous Lenape encampments by Corlears Hook, farms along the Bowery run by free Black residents, wealthy estates stretching beyond the bounds of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, and the early slum built on a landfill over Collect Pond known as Five Points. In the 1820s and 1840s, the influx of Irish and German immigration began. Tenements, the notoriously crowded apartment structures that became almost synonymous with the Lower East Side, housed nearly half a million people in 15,000 buildings by 1865. Eastern European Jews arrived in significant numbers around 1880, Italians and Chinese soon after. After World War II, Puerto Ricans and African Americans migrated to the Lower East Side, followed by Dominican, Polish, and Ukrainian immigrants. Sometimes these groups united and sometimes they clashed, but often their cultural lives and working lives intermingled.

The Germans were perhaps the first group to make the Lower East Side a bastion of the Left. The Sozialistische Turnverein became the cultural center of the German community on the Lower East Side in the 1850s and early 1860s. In the tradition of the German Turner movement of the 1830s, this organization promoted “true liberty, prosperity, and free education for all.” From their headquarters on Orchard Street—later from a fancy hall “uptown” on Fourth Street—the Turners trained for what they thought was the imminent revolt in Germany. They also ran a school, a bar, a restaurant, offered drama and poetry classes, and sponsored lectures on topics in vogue: phrenology, vegetarianism, homeopathic medicine, woman suffrage. The club’s publication introduced the writings of Marx and Engels. After the Civil War, a new generation of German immigrant radicalism appeared on the Lower East Side with a focus on working life. Its headquarters was the Tenth Ward Hotel on the corner of Broome and Forsythe Streets, where competing socialistic groups formed, argued, and split up in rapid succession. In the early 1870s, eight-hour agitation began and the Paris Commune raised hopes among Lower East side radicals. In January 1874, following the economic crisis of the previous year, some seven thousand people—women and children as well as twelve hundred members of the German Tenth Ward Workingmen’s Association—assembled in Tompkins Square Park to demand public programs to alleviate unemployment and hunger. The police moved in, made arrests, and started to beat up the crowd, which fought back. In the first line stood Justus Schwab, who ran a bar on First Street and First Avenue, a radical hangout frequented by Emma Goldman and her anarchist friends, carrying waving the red flag of the Commune.

With new generations of immigrants came new Left waves. By 1880 the arrival of Eastern European Jews prompted the more assimilated Germans to move uptown, and Jewish socialism replaced German radicalism. Yiddish became the language of a swath of the Lower East Side. As one story goes, in Eisl’s Golden Rule Hall on Rivington Street in 1882, Abraham Cahan disappointed the Russian-speaking leaders of the Propaganda Association for the Dissemination of Socialist Ideas among Immigrant Jews by explaining that his brethren spoke Yiddish. Cahan was promptly hired as Yiddish-language lecturer; he went on to become the powerful editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, a newspaper housed in a building on East Broadway whose entrance was decorated with reliefs of Marx, Engels, Liebknecht, and Lassalle. Later on, every better café claimed “Trotsky drank here,” from the Garden Cafeteria near the Forward building to Café Royale on Second Avenue. Further, emerging forms of popular culture around the turn of the century became integral to fostering a Jewish identity on the Lower East Side. Yiddish theaters opened along Second Avenue, which became known as “Yiddish Broadway.” Thousands of people joined leftist organizations that sponsored picnics, dances, and even summer enclaves outside of the city, alongside parades and organizing that sought improved conditions for better lives.

Immigrant workers put themselves at the center of the city’s labor movement, which grew between 1909 and 1913 from 30,000 to 250,000 union members. Eastern European Jews formed the United Hebrew Trades—although a hostile observer claimed that their knowledge of unionism spanned only from East Broadway to Houston Street. Immigrant women, meanwhile, showed their power as consumers in the Lower East Side meat boycotts of 1902 and workers in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). In late 1909, 23-year-old Clara Lemlich of the ILGWU’s Local 25 set the “Uprising of Twenty Thousand” in motion when she called for a general strike, in Yiddish, at Cooper Union. After striking for 11 weeks, shirtwaist workers won wage and hour concessions. Yet In 1911 the Triangle Waist Factory in Greenwich Village—where many young Eastern European and Italian Lower East Siders worked—went up in flames, trapping workers and killing 146 people, leading to new state laws and city ordinances regulating safety and factory conditions. In 1933, Chinese laundry workers organized against discriminatory city ordinances and Chinatown elites to form the New York Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance, with Lei Zhuofeng as its first president. Influenced in part by the Chinese nationalist revolution in the 1910s and 1920s, the democratic membership organization charted its own path through leftist politics, flourishing until the 1950s, when its continual support of the People’s Republic of China made it a target of McCarthyism and numbers dwindled. By then changes to Chinese Exclusion laws enabled Chinese women to emigrate in significant numbers, working in Chinatown garment factories. As members of the same ILGWU as the shirtwaist workers in the early 1900s, they struck in 1982.

Housing has long been a site of struggle on the Lower East Side. Tenement living meant poor sanitation and health conditions, from infant mortality to tuberculosis and the 1918 flu pandemic. In addition to documenting these conditions in works such as Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), reformers lived alongside immigrant families through the settlement house movement, helping them access healthcare, educational programs, and social services. Eleanor Roosevelt worked with children on Rivington Street, while Lillian Wald began the Visiting Nurse Service of New York—and essentially the public health nursing profession—out of the Henry Street settlement. Meanwhile, in the 1920s unions began building limited equity housing cooperatives on Grand Street near the East River: the Amalgamated Dwellings opened in 1930 after the first Amalgamated in the Bronx; Hillman Houses, named after Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union President Sidney Hillman opened in 1950; and two others followed later that decade. By then the Lower East Side’s population had decreased, as immigration rules of the 1920s limited new arrivals and earlier generations of immigrants departed. Meanwhile, Red Scares impacted leftist cultural formations, and Prohibition cracked down on beer halls, saloons, and other gathering places deemed centers of vice.

After World War II the white flight and government neglect that accompanied urban renewal severely impacted the neighborhood’s built environment, while new immigrants and migrants moved to the Lower East Side and reshaped it once again. In particular, the children of Puerto Ricans who had left the island in greater numbers beginning in the 1940s created a new commercial center along Avenue C or Loisaida, along with a new generation of radical institutions and organizations. New York’s Young Lords, although headquartered in East Harlem, announced their formation in Tompkins Square Park on the anniversary of the Cuban Revolution in 1969 and maintained a presence in the neighborhood. The following year pioneering trans activist Sylvia P. Rivera, who had also marched with the Young Lords, founded STAR House (short for Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) on East Second Street with Marsha P. Johnson: the first shelter in the nation for homeless trans youth. The Loisaida Movement also created innovative community spaces in the neighborhood that made use of abandoned lots and subverted private speculation, from community gardens and urban homesteading—including geodesic orb shelters created with Buckminster Fuller and a wind-powered apartment building on East 11th Street—to the Nuyorican Poets Café. These groups overlapped with the antiwar movement and its Lower East Side outposts, from the Bread and Puppet Theater founded on Delancey Street to the Peace Pentagon on Lafayette.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, gentrification sparked new struggles on the Lower East Side. In 1988, as in 1874, a riot broke out in Tompkins Square Park, this time when hundreds of police officers enforcing a newly-imposed nightly curfew surrounded a homeless encampment and charged at protestors. The police riot led to both a movement to demand more affordable housing and the forced closure of the park for renovation in 1991, opening a year later and symbolizing an era of gentrification in the Lower East Side. The Jewish Daily Forward building turned into luxury condos in the 1990s, and the anarcho-punk performance and gathering space ABC No Rio was exiled from its original home on Rivington Street in 2016. Other institutions remained, from the Henry Street Settlement and the Nuyorican Poets Café to the Chinese Staff and Workers Association and the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center. Significant numbers of Jews, Asian Americans, Latinx, And African American Lower East Siders still called pieces of the neighborhood home—living in (privatized) co-ops, public housing, new construction, and walkup tenements—alongside other longtime New Yorkers and new arrivals.

Bagchee, Nandini. Counter Institution: Activist Estates of the Lower East Side. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.

Buhle, Paul. From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture. New York: Verso, 2004.

Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life they Found and Made. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.

Jaffe, Steve. Activist New York: A History of People, Protest, and Politics. New York University Press, 2018.

Nadel, Stanley. Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845-80. University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Patterson, Clayton, ed. Resistance: A Radical Social and Political History of the Lower EastSide. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006.

Yu, Renqiu. To Save China, to Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance of New York. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995.

Lower East Side Photograph Collection, 1901. Guide. New York Historical Society. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/nyhs/lowereast/index.htm