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Activities: Context Activities How the Other Half Lived: The Lower East Side  Back to Context Activities
Touring the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early years of the twentieth century, author Henry James was shocked by the "intensity of the material picture in the dense Yiddish quarter." An area populated almost entirely by impoverished immigrants, the Lower East Side must have astonished James, who had spent most of his life surrounded by wealth and privilege. The neighborhood was indeed "intense" and "dense"; in fact, by the turn of the century the area had a population density of 330,000 people per square mile. Photographs of the Lower East Side from the period show narrow streets, towering run-down tenements, crowds of adults and children, throngs of pushcarts and peddlers, and laundry hanging out of windows. It was a densely inhabited area that afforded little distinction between the sidewalk and the street, or between private homes and public spaces. Home to literally millions of immigrants, the Lower East Side could seem like a confusing, crowded maze because it contained countless mini-communities composed of different ethnic groups. Irish, German, Italian, Greek, Chinese, African, African American, and Arab families lived in different sections of the neighborhood. But by far the largest ethnic community consisted of Jews who had emigrated from Eastern Europe. While these groups all maintained separate and diverse traditions--and sometimes found that their differences created rivalries and hostility--they were united by their poverty, their status as outsiders, and their desire to find material success in America. Most individuals living on the Lower East Side at the turn of the century lived in tenement apartments or slept in cheap lodging houses. Typical tenement flats consisted of two or three very small rooms into which a family of between four and eight would live with a boarder or two. Workspaces were no less congested--the "sweat-shops" were crowded with underpaid laborers who worked between thirteen and eighteen hours a day, six and sometimes seven days a week. In these conditions, crime, disease, fires, and accidents were common occurrences. The appalling poverty of the Lower East Side became a popular topic for reformers and sensation-seeking journalists alike. Many books and articles offered titillating glimpses into this "vicious underworld" and hysterically warned that the Lower East Side was breeding a "criminal element" that would soon menace the rest of the city. Others proposed social and economic reforms to address the inequities that compelled immigrants to live and work in such squalid conditions. Most notably, Jacob A. Riis's newspaper articles, graphic photographs, and illustrated book-length exposé, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890), shocked Americans and led to some civic reforms designed to protect poor tenement-dwellers. As crowded, exploitative, and oppressive as the Lower East Side may have been, however, it was not simply the pit of unmitigated misery and evil that many nineteenth-century journalists portrayed. Rather, in spite of the rampant poverty and harsh working conditions, the neighborhood was a dynamic community infused with a vibrant and diverse cultural life. Ethnic restaurants and saloons offered an enticing variety of food and drink; halls hosted dances, weddings, union meetings, and scholarly lectures; theatres and music halls mounted plays and concerts; and synagogues, churches, temples, and schools served as important social centers. The inhabitants of the Lower East Side formed a thriving community in their crowded section of Manhattan, melding their old traditions with new ones to form a diverse culture that had a lasting impact on New York and on America. Questions
[5023] Detroit Publishing Company, Mulberry Street, New York City (c. 1900), courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZC4-1584]. New York City received huge numbers of immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. In the bustling streets of the Lower East Side, Old World met New in a population that ranged from Eastern European and Russian Jews to Irish Catholics. [5124] T. De Thulstrup, Home of the Poor (1883), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-75197]. This illustration shows an interior view of a crowded New York City tenement. The living conditions of the city's poor at the turn of the twentieth century eventually sparked a wave of social reform. [5125] Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, New York City--The Recent "Heated Term" and Its Effect upon the Population of the Tenement District (1882), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-75193]. The tenements that were home to many of New York City's immigrants were often dismal and usually lacked proper sanitary facilities. These harsh conditions challenged immigrants and contributed to a perception that immigrants were somehow "damaging" the country. [5126] Lewis Wickes Hines, Rear View of Tenement, 134 1/2 Thompson ST., New York City (1912), courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Photograph of the back of a tenement housing-complex in New York City. Like writer Theodore Dreiser, photographer Lewis Wickes Hines documented social conditions in America at the beginning of the twentieth century. [6352] Anonymous, Hester Street, NY (c.1903), courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration. Hester Street is one of many places on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that Anzia Yezierska described in her writing. |
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