Lower East Side

The designation “Lower East Side” refers to a section of Manhattan between the East River to the east and the Bowery to the west. Its northern border is considered to be Houston Street. The name “Lower East Side” did not come into common use until the 1940s. Before that New Yorkers and others referred to the area as “downtown,” “east side” or often “the Hebrew quarter” or “the ghetto.”

The Lower East Side has had its longest association with Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, who began to settle in New York in the 1870s. Between the 1870s and the 1920s, the Lower East Side had the highest Jewish population density in the world—and indeed, the highest Jewish population density of all time. The eastern European Jewish immigrants tended to settle on the streets of the Lower East Side and then move quickly to other New York neighborhoods. But as long as immigration to the United States continued in large numbers, the neighborhood continuously filled up with newcomers. By the 1910s, new immigrants also went to Brooklyn and Harlem, and the Lower East Side became just one choice among several others.

In the decades of Jewish settlement on the Lower East Side, the neighborhood drew many observers to its streets. Reporters, photographers, and social reformers came to the Lower East Side to document its poverty. Others came there to improve it by creating social settlement houses, training schools, and other institutions of uplift. These observers were appalled by the dirt, poverty, and disease they found. They also judged the thousands of pushcarts that thronged the streets to be dangerous and unsightly. Outsiders who came in and saw the neighborhood as a problem actually tapped into community sentiment. Many of the neighborhood's residents concurred with the observation that the streets were dirty, the apartments unhealthy and overcrowded. Many joined with settlement house workers and reformers to bring changes to the Lower East Side. They also made avid use of the classes, lectures, clubs, and other facilities of the Educational Alliance, the University Settlement, and the Henry Street Settlement, funded and founded by outsiders.

The Lower East Side was significant for Jewish immigrants because of the cultural institutions that were born there. Yiddish journalism, theater, letters, and by the 1920s, radio, in the United States flowed from the Lower East Side. Eastern European Jewish immigrants living in other cities consumed the cultural products of the Lower East Side and came to see this neighborhood as the epicenter of their culture. On the political front, Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side played a powerful role in the unionization of the garment industry, and the high levels of socialist activity in the neighborhood made it at the time unique in the U.S. political landscape. The Lower East Side also housed hundreds of synagogues, particularly small storefront synagogues, and the dozens of landsmanshaftn, or “hometown societies” (benevolent and social societies organized by European town and region from which the immigrants came), had meeting halls throughout the Lower East Side.

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