NY's Lower East Side, tenements, pushcarts, migrants and modernity.

The Lower East Side got going in the C19th. In 1818, a market-house was built in the centre of Grand St be­tween Lud­low and Essex Sts, south of the present-day market. The new­comers, from Germany and Ire­land, arrived into NY City en masse by the 1840s-50s. Tenement Mus­eum suggested that 1+ mill­ion people left Ire­land, often landing in NY. Then more of the new Irish arrivals to Man­hattan fled after the Great Famine of 1848. In the 1840s NY’s popul­ation grew by 60%, and grew by another 58% in the 1850s.

The Hist­orical Atlas of NY reported that the Germans arrived in 3 waves: 1] c1.3 mill Germans arrived during the antebellum era (pre-1861); 2] a mass wave followed the Civil War, 1865-79 and 3] the lar­gest wave from 1880 on. Most Germans sett­l­ed in a 400-block area, north of Divis­ion St and east of the Bowery. Along the East Riv­er, this was known as Kleindeutsch­land/Little Germ­any.

In 1843, the Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor de­scribed housing as problematic in size, arrangement, water sup­pl­ies, warmth and ventilation; sewage was also in bad condition. Famil­ies moved in and out of these tenements with­out rep­airs, deteriorating with time. Clearly the over­crowd­ed Lower East produced ser­ious sanit­at­ion problems.

For hundreds of thous­ands of immig­rants, a teeming Lower East Side tene­m­ent was their first home in the Golden Land. Note the Tenement House Law they passed in 1879, seeking to limit the prop­ort­ion of a block that could be built upon.

Most of the Jew­ish immigrants who left Eastern Europe back then, esp­ec­ial­ly Russians, left for economic rea­sons or escaping persecution. Their immig­ration to NY was a perm­anent reloc­ation as most had no cap­it­al to bring with them. They needed the cheapest housing options. The first pushcarts in Hester St arrived in 1886 when the area was facing massive change. The wave of immigration brought 2.5+ million Eastern European Jews to the U.S, a third starting on the Lower East Side.

In the European shtetls, pushcarts had been a common sight. Under Tsarist rule Jews could not own land, and the peddling of goods was one of the few ways of surviving. So on arr­ival to the U.S, pedd­ling was a recommended job. In 1880 a cart rented for 10 cents, cap­able of carrying fish, pickles, clothes and siddurim. And because ped­dlers were their own boss, observant Jews could keep their Sabbath.

Photo journ­al­ist Jacob Riis’ became an important tool for docum­enting immigrants’ hardships. He publish­ed How the Ot­her Half Lives 1890, inviting the mid­dle classes to walk al­ong NY’s imm­ig­rant enclav­es, where crowds jostled and shouted in foreign tongues. Thus the unsafe living conditions of the Lower East Side became a larger public con­cern. The proper American way to shop meant going into stores where the mer­ch­an­d­ise was neat and prices were clearly marked. The proper shop­s were blocked and the progressive ref­orm­ers worried that carts were part of an exploitative system.

The NY Times ran an article about pushcarts in 1893, disparaging the entire Jewish and Lower East Side immigrant community. “This neigh­bour­­­hood, filled by the people who claim to have been driven from Pol­and and Russia, was perhaps the filthiest place on the continent”.

Riis and Lillian Wald’s concerns about immigrants appeared in the NY Herald in 1895; it de­s­cribed the frightful con­ditions they found in the Lower East Side. This led to the Tene­ment House Com­m­ittee making maps in 1896, to conduct a formal investigation of tenement houses: the population of each block, plus the number of typhoid­ fever, TB, scarlet fever and diphtheria cases. In resp­on­se, the city passed the Tenement House Law of 1901. Riis also showed the app­al­ling reality of neigh­bour­hood life in Battle of the Slum 1902.

With the Great Depression, new public works started. The City’s Dept of Buildings demol­ished some brick tenement buildings along Essex St, between Del­an­cey and Riv­ington Sts. By the 1930s Mayor Fior­ello La­Guardia ruled that the open pushcart market was ant­iquated and unsan­itary; ped­dlers were a danger to them­sel­ves and to others, by creating traffic con­gestion. Using fed­eral money, LaGuardia wanted to create new indoor markets and in his att­em­pts to profession­al­ise push­cart vendors, street busin­ess drastically declined. Two ar­ch­it­ects were comm­issioned by the Dept of Markets to design the Essex St Mar­k­et and vital fed­eral funds were made av­ail­­able via Pres Frank­lin D Roose­velt’s Works Progress Administ­ration/WPA.