The Lower East Side has been home to some of the city's most iconic restaurants, shopping venues, and architecture. The neighborhood has also welcomed generations of immigrants, from newly arrived Italians and Jews to today's Latino and Asian newcomers. This history has become somewhat obscured, however, as the Lower East Side can appear more hip than historic, with wealth and gentrification changing the character of the neighborhood. Chronicling these developments, along with the hidden gems that still speak of a vibrant immigrant identity, Joyce Mendelsohn provides a complete guide to the Lower East Side of then and now. After an extensive history that stretches back to Manhattan's first settlers, Mendelsohn offers 5 self-guided walking tours, including a new passage through the Bowery, that take the reader to more than 150 sites and highlight the dynamics of a community of contrasts: aged tenements nestled among luxury apartment towers abut historic churches and synagogues. With updated and revised maps, historical data, and an entirely new community to explore, Mendelsohn writes a brand-new chapter in an old New York story.

Manhattan's Lower East Side stands for Jewish experience in America. With the possible exception of African-Americans and Harlem, no ethnic group has been so thoroughly understood and imagined through a particular chunk of space. Despite the fact that most American Jews have never set foot there--and many come from families that did not immigrate through New York much less reside on Hester or Delancey Street--the Lower East Side is firm in their collective memory. Whether they have been there or not, people reminisce about the Lower East Side as the place where life pulsated, bread tasted better, relationships were richer, tradition thrived, and passions flared. This was not always so. During the years now fondly recalled (1880-1930), the neighborhood was only occasionally called the Lower East Side. Though largely populated by Jews from Eastern Europe, it was not ethnically or even religiously homogenous. The tenements, grinding poverty, sweatshops, and packs of roaming children were considered the stuff of social work, not nostalgia and romance. To learn when and why this dark warren of pushcart-lined streets became an icon, Hasia Diner follows a wide trail of high and popular culture. She examines children's stories, novels, movies, museum exhibits, television shows, summer-camp reenactments, walking tours, consumer catalogues, and photos hung on deli walls far from Manhattan. Diner finds that it was after World War II when the Lower East Side was enshrined as the place through which Jews passed from European oppression to the promised land of America. The space became sacred at a time when Jews were simultaneously absorbing the enormity of the Holocaust and finding acceptance and opportunity in an increasingly liberal United States. Particularly after 1960, the Lower East Side gave often secularized and suburban Jews a biblical, yet distinctly American story about who they were and how they got here. Displaying the author's own fondness for the Lower East Side of story books, combined with a commitment to historical truth, Lower East Side Memories is an insightful account of one of our most famous neighborhoods and its power to shape identity.

"Life on the Lower East Side, the first monograph of Lepkoff's work, highlights the area between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges from the Bowery to the East River. Over 170 beautifully reproduced duotone photographs and essays by Peter E. Dans and Suzanne Wasserman uncover a forgotten time and place and reveal how the Lower East Side remains both unaltered and forever changed."--BOOK JACKET.

A collection of personal memories and insights from 25 longtime residents of this storied and ever-changing NYC neighborhood. The Lower East Side is one of Manhattan’s most vibrant neighborhoods. For centuries, it has been home to hundreds of enclaves of immigrants from every part of the world. As they became New Yorkers, the neighborhood has in turn become infused with their cultures, foods, traditions, and personalities. In this book, local historians Eric Ferrara and Nina Howes document the stories and remembrances of twenty-five Lower East Side residents who helped make it what it is today. From childhood memories with family (but without running water) to observations of the constantly changing city, Lower East Side Oral Histories reveals this larger-than-life corner of New York through the eyes and voices of the people who lived there.

“A startling, clear-eyed” memoir of an immigrant girl’s childhood in early 20th century NYC from the journalist and Tony-winning co-author of Kiss Me Kate (Booklist). Born in Transylvania in 1899, Bella Spewack arrived on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side when she was three. At twenty-two, while working as a reporter with her husband in Europe, she wrote a memoir of her childhood that was never published. More than seventy years later, the publication of Streets recovers a remarkable voice and offers a vivid chronicle of a lost world. Bella, who went on to a brilliant career write for stage and screen with her husband Sam, describes the sights, sounds, and characters of urban Jewish immigrant life after the turn of the century. Witty, street-smart, and unsentimental, Bella was a genuine American heroine who displays in this memoir “a triumph of will and spirit” (The Jewish Week).

The classic book on the Lower East Side's synagogues and their congregations, past and present-now back in print in a completely revised and expanded edition