The densest immigrant quarter in the world in 1900, with 500,000 people packed into two square miles. The tenements are still standing and a few of the shops never closed.
Half a million people
By 1900 the Lower East Side held around half a million people in about two square miles, which made it the most densely populated place on earth. Most of them were Eastern European Jews, arriving at a rate the city had no plan for, into tenements built to house far fewer with no plumbing and, in the earliest buildings, no windows in the interior rooms.
Jacob Riis photographed it in How the Other Half Lives in 1890 and the resulting scandal produced the first tenement reform laws, which is why buildings from before and after 1901 look different — the later ones have airshafts and indoor toilets.
The Tenement Museum on Orchard Street is the single best way to understand any of this, and it is a guided tour of the actual rooms.
The food that survived
Katz’s Delicatessen on Houston, open since 1888, cash and ticket system, pastrami cut by hand. The system: take a ticket at the door, order at the counter from a carver, tip the carver, pay on the way out, do not lose the ticket.
Russ & Daughters on Houston, appetizing since 1914, still family owned — smoked salmon, whitefish, herring, bagels. The sit-down café is around the corner on Orchard.
Kossar’s on Grand for bialys, which are not bagels and the difference matters here.
Yonah Schimmel’s on Houston for knishes, since 1910.
The Pickle Guys on Grand, the last of the barrel pickle sellers.
What else
The Eldridge Street Synagogue, 1887, Moorish Revival, restored after decades of near-collapse and now a museum. The rose window is modern, by Kiki Smith.
Essex Market, rebuilt across the road from its 1940 building, is a proper public market with Latin, Jewish and Asian traders.
Orchard Street was the pushcart and garment street and still has a run of small shops.
Now
The neighbourhood is one of the busiest nightlife districts in Manhattan — Ludlow, Orchard, Rivington and Stanton Streets are wall-to-wall bars and it gets loud from Thursday to Sunday. There is a decent gallery scene, a good music venue in the Bowery Ballroom, and the New Museum on the Bowery, a stack of off-centre white boxes, is the contemporary art anchor.
More Neighborhoods
Midtown
Where the skyscrapers, the theatres and most of the hotels are. Nobody who lives in New York would choose to live here, and almost every visitor should stay here once.
Lower Manhattan
The oldest part of the city, where the streets predate the grid and bend around vanished shorelines. Offices by day, increasingly residential by night.
Greenwich Village
Low brick townhouses on streets that ignore the grid, because the Village was a separate settlement before the grid arrived and refused to be redrawn.