Yesterday and Today

NEW YORK, NY — The Lower East Side (the area south of East Houston Street and west of the East River, with disputed boundaries to the west and to the south).


YESTERDAY

60: Percent of the Lower East Side's population that was Jewish in 1915 (the neighborhood's boundaries at that time stretched all the way up to 14th Street).

1 in 3: Proportion of Americans of Jewish descent who have an ancestor who lived on the Lower East Side after arriving in this country.

7,000: Number of working class immigrants from more than 20 nations who lived in a single, five-story building—97 Orchard Street—between its construction in 1863 and 1935.

1901: Year in which the first indoor toilets were installed at 97 Orchard Street.

1,000: Number of people who attended services during the High Holy Days at the Eldridge Street Synagogue, the spiritual home of the first Eastern European Orthodox Jewish congregation in America. Crowds were so great after the synagogue opened in 1887 that mounted policemen patrolled the area and people paid rent to reserve their seats in the pews.

275,000: Circulation size in the U.S. of the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward in the early 1930s, when its headquarters were located at 175 East Broadway, a 10-story office building with a facade featuring carved bas relief portraits of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.

121: Age of Katz's Delicatessen at Houston and Ludlow Streets, the oldest deli in New York City, and the only one where workers still cut the pastrami and corned beef by hand.


TODAY

4: Number of Oscars won by the film When Harry Met Sally, in which Billy Crystal's Harry sat with Meg Ryan's Sally while she faked an orgasm at a table in Katz's Delicatessen, where a sign now reads: "Congratulations! You're sitting where Harry met Sally."

33: Length of the run (in years) of the legendary CBGB & OMFUG—"Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers"—at Bowery and Bleecker Streets. The club was founded in 1973, and soon left behind its folksy name to become the home of a new kind of music, called punk rock, that was played in many clubs near Bowery Street by bands like New York natives The Ramones. It closed in 2006.

1994: Year in which the tenement at 97 Orchard became a National Historic Landmark. It now houses the successful Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which has restored six of the building's original apartments.

1 in 3: Proportion of Puerto Ricans living in the continental United States who have a relative who has lived in the Lower East Side.

24: Percentage of Lower East Side residents who list Hispanic as their ethnic group.

51.6: Percentage of Lower East Side residents who list Asian/Pacific Islander as their race.

16,945: In dollars, the per capita income of the Lower East Side. The US per capita income in 1999 was $21,587."

2 dozen: Number of synagogues currently active south of 14th Street.

1: Number of Romaniote (Greek Jewish) synagogues that remain in the Western Hemisphere. The lone synagogue is Kehila Kedosha Janina at Broome and Allen Streets.

50-50: The probability, according to City Secrets New York City, that the young person sitting next to you at one of the many new hipster bars on Ludlow Street is either an artist recently profiled in The New York Times or a New York University student playing hooky.

3: Kinds of wine—CHEAP, DECENT, and GOOD—that are served at Schiller's at 131 Rivington Street, the inspiration for novelist Richard Price's Cafe Berkmann in his acclaimed 2008 novel Lush Life, which explores the conflicting identities of the neighborhood through the murder of a Lower East Side hipster by a street kid. The influx of well-off young people has been controversial. The Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy derisively calls the changes "hipification" and "Yupification."

Today on the Lower East Side, cultures new and old butt up against one another in an uneasy but (to the outsider) exhilarating whorl: a mere corner of a city block can contain a Mexican vendor selling sweet flavored ice, a Middle Eastern cart full of fresh mangoes, a Dominican cafe cooking spicy sandwiches, and an old Jewish deli hawking hunks of pastrami (all cheap, for the visitor). Some blocks resemble a World's Fair of bargain grocery stores, places of worship, and trendy bars. Red brick housing projects hide not far away. Even while standing at the base of a solid and impressive historic landmark, the outsider cannot escape feeling the juxtapositions in his gut. Novelist Price enjoys visiting Schiller's in part for the decor, which was taken from old warehouses. One of his comments captures a modern Lower East Side sensibility: "It's all a stage set," he told the New York Times, "and now it's, like, venerable."


Alex M. McLeese ’11, a Crimson news writer, is a history concentrator in Cabot House.