LOWER EAST SIDE

Description

Essentials about the Lower East Side in brief

As a gateway for immigrants to the United States, the Lower East Side has been a melting pot of cultures for many decades. The melting pot has given this Manhattan neighborhood a distinctive character due to the diversity of languages and religions. Once considered a slum of Manhattan and shunned, in recent years the Lower East Side has increasingly become one of New York City’s hipper neighborhoods with a very lively art and gastronomy scene.

The location of the Lower East Side

The exact demarcation of the district today is made with Houston Street to the north, Bowery to the west and the East River to the south and east. Until the 1960s, today’s East Village counted as a northern part of the Lower East Side. Cultural workers and real estate agents forced the separation by name in order to be able to distinguish themselves from the slums in the southern area of the Lower East Side.

The history of the Lower East Side

The growth of the Lower East Side began with the great waves of immigration in the 19th century. In the first half of the 19th century, the Irish arrived. Beginning around 1855, the great wave of German immigration began. By 1870, more than 170,000 German-speaking immigrants lived in the Lower East Side, which is why the neighborhood was called “Little Germany” in the northern part. At the same time, Little Italy began to develop to the west of it and Chinatown to the southwest around the turn of the century.

Starting in 1880, numerous Jews from Eastern Europe also settled. By 1915, Jewish immigrants made up nearly 60 percent of the Lower East Side population. Although most of the Jewish population has since moved away from the neighborhood, evidence of Jewish life can still be found in many places on the Lower East Side, including synagogues, Judaica stores, Jewish theaters and, of course, kosher bakeries and delis. A true institution in the New York gastro scene is the famous Katz’s Deli, known not only for its XL portions, but also for the famous movie scene from “When Harry met Sally” with Meg Ryan’s legendary fake orgasm.

From the early 1940s to the late 1950s, large parts of the Lower East Side, especially the neighborhoods along the East River, underwent extensive area redevelopment. These measures coincided with a period of considerable expansion of public housing in New York City. In densely built neighborhoods such as the Lower East Side, this occurred almost entirely at the expense of existing 19th century development.

With the liberalization of immigration laws in the 1960s, immigrants from Latin America, Central America, and various Asian countries began to arrive. By the late 1990s, Chinatown had also expanded across parts of the Lower East Side. Today, therefore, the population of the Lower East Side is primarily a diverse mix of people from Latin American and Asian countries.

Since the 1960s, there has been an increasing gentrification of East Village by hippies, musicians and artists who settled here. In recent years, East Village’s tendency toward trendiness has extended to the parts of the Lower East Side that have not yet been redeveloped. Many stores and institutions that existed for several generations are no longer to be found. The Lower East Side is now a nightlife district with many concert venues and a hotspot for New York’s gallery scene. Dozens of art galleries have opened in the area in recent decades. No wonder gallery hopping is a popular activity on the Lower East Side.

The museums of the Lower East Side

The Lower East is also home to some very interesting museums. If you want to learn more about the living conditions of New York immigrants in the 19th century, you should make your way to the Tenement Museum. In the impressive location of a former tenement for immigrants, one feels a bit transported back to the movie “Gangs of New York”.

If you want to learn more about the Jewish history of the neighborhood, head to the Museum at Eldridge Street. Housed in the former Eldridge Street Synagogue, the museum provides a good insight into the life of Jewish immigrants in the United States.

And modern art lovers should definitely see the New Museum of Contemporary Art. It is worth a visit for its architecture alone. The seven-story building is a visual counterpoint to the other architecture on the Lower East Side. Its contemporary art exhibitions are among the best in the world.