ONE OF MY FAVORITE PLACES WHEN I LIVED IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK...
WAS THE VILLAGE SURROUNDING SECOND AVENUE AND NINTH STREET. The northern border was 14th Street, only five blocks away, but the main drag was 2nd Avenue. From 1880, this had become the center of what was known as the Jewish Rialto, where Yiddish variations of the 14th Street formulas were staged for Jewish immigrant audiences. But its great days had come to an end for a number of reasons, primarily because of the erosion of the Yiddish language. But along 2nd Avenue there still remained traces of what had passed.
"In those days," a neighborhood Rabbi told me, "You'd see a delicatessen store here (where you ordered a glass tea with goodies) and the Gem Spa (offering egg creams in Manhattan). There was Ratner's, a dairy restaurant near East 6th Street, which was famous for cheese blintzes, kreplaches, latkes, in spite of the legendary rudeness of the waiters; and Yiddish newspapers on newsstands, and on weekends, you could see cars from the United Jewish Appeal roaming the side streets, visiting old people who had been left behind by children and grandchildren, and lived in tenements that had no heat or too many flights of stairs to climb."
When you walk those streets today, you think of those people and marvel at how long they held on to their small pieces of New York. Old photographs of the Lower East Side show how that world once looked. They are like characters in a long novel, immigrants arriving in the port of New York, the anti-Semitic violence of 1906, the General Slocum disaster, where more than a thousand German children died in the sinking of that excursion ship in the East River. Many of them moved uptown, to Yorkville and other places. The entire area from the Bowery to the East River, from Houston Street to the Brooklyn Bridge, was then called the Lower East Side, and it was overwhelmingly Jewish and poor. For many of them, it was the only America they ever knew.
For most of the immigrants, the Lower East Side was a place of grueling work and invincible hope. This was the area in which my mother and her family once lived with a Jewish family for a short time after they arrived in the Harbor of New York from Belgium in 1907. Her family was cast into a large, teeming, indifferent city, the men took whatever work they could find, primarily in sweat-shops, while the women did piecework in the crowded kitchens. Few envisioned anything as extravagant as a career. That would be for their American children. The hope for many was to own a pushcart or possibly a small shop. I remember wandering the area once, looking at each and every building, and imagining where it was that my mother and her family may have lived.
As I walked the Lower East Side, Katz's Deli was still open on Houston Street, as is the Yonah Shimmel Knish Bakery, the store where my mother's brother, Charlie, once swept the floor for 5 cents per week, has been there since 1910. There are kosher bakeries along Grand Street near the East River. But when I walked along the length of Hester Street, one of the legendary streets of the New York Jewish past, every single store now has a sign in Chinese. The sidewalks were dense with people: artists in paint-spattered jeans; bearded poets; gay young men and women it two and threes; careening drunken college boys; and tourists with startled eyes.
But they were sidewalks where my mother had once walked...and it was a marvelous show.
WAS THE VILLAGE SURROUNDING SECOND AVENUE AND NINTH STREET. The northern border was 14th Street, only five blocks away, but the main drag was 2nd Avenue. From 1880, this had become the center of what was known as the Jewish Rialto, where Yiddish variations of the 14th Street formulas were staged for Jewish immigrant audiences. But its great days had come to an end for a number of reasons, primarily because of the erosion of the Yiddish language. But along 2nd Avenue there still remained traces of what had passed.
"In those days," a neighborhood Rabbi told me, "You'd see a delicatessen store here (where you ordered a glass tea with goodies) and the Gem Spa (offering egg creams in Manhattan). There was Ratner's, a dairy restaurant near East 6th Street, which was famous for cheese blintzes, kreplaches, latkes, in spite of the legendary rudeness of the waiters; and Yiddish newspapers on newsstands, and on weekends, you could see cars from the United Jewish Appeal roaming the side streets, visiting old people who had been left behind by children and grandchildren, and lived in tenements that had no heat or too many flights of stairs to climb."
When you walk those streets today, you think of those people and marvel at how long they held on to their small pieces of New York. Old photographs of the Lower East Side show how that world once looked. They are like characters in a long novel, immigrants arriving in the port of New York, the anti-Semitic violence of 1906, the General Slocum disaster, where more than a thousand German children died in the sinking of that excursion ship in the East River. Many of them moved uptown, to Yorkville and other places. The entire area from the Bowery to the East River, from Houston Street to the Brooklyn Bridge, was then called the Lower East Side, and it was overwhelmingly Jewish and poor. For many of them, it was the only America they ever knew.
For most of the immigrants, the Lower East Side was a place of grueling work and invincible hope. This was the area in which my mother and her family once lived with a Jewish family for a short time after they arrived in the Harbor of New York from Belgium in 1907. Her family was cast into a large, teeming, indifferent city, the men took whatever work they could find, primarily in sweat-shops, while the women did piecework in the crowded kitchens. Few envisioned anything as extravagant as a career. That would be for their American children. The hope for many was to own a pushcart or possibly a small shop. I remember wandering the area once, looking at each and every building, and imagining where it was that my mother and her family may have lived.
As I walked the Lower East Side, Katz's Deli was still open on Houston Street, as is the Yonah Shimmel Knish Bakery, the store where my mother's brother, Charlie, once swept the floor for 5 cents per week, has been there since 1910. There are kosher bakeries along Grand Street near the East River. But when I walked along the length of Hester Street, one of the legendary streets of the New York Jewish past, every single store now has a sign in Chinese. The sidewalks were dense with people: artists in paint-spattered jeans; bearded poets; gay young men and women it two and threes; careening drunken college boys; and tourists with startled eyes.
But they were sidewalks where my mother had once walked...and it was a marvelous show.
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