A Hidden Lower East Side

      The Archdiocese of New York announced early this February that, after 163 years, they will be closing St. Brigid's on the corner of 7th and Ave A –– as well as four other schools serving a large base of low-income students across the city (one in Harlem, two in the Bronx, and one in Staten Island). Citing low enrollment rates, this news came as a shock to many of the students, parents, and staff of these schools who must now suddenly navigate the vast NYC school system. Throughout the 20th century as schools crumbled, shuttered, and were re-built, affordable private education like St. Brigid's has provided a reliable and safe environment for low-income predominantly Black and Latino communities across the city. The Archdiocese's lack of commitment to these "underperforming" schools only mirrors the deeper struggles facing perhaps the most segregated school system in the country. St. Emeric's School on Ave. D        The St. Brigid S...

      Last month, Bowery Boogie reported that the building at 527 Grand Street, home to the People Choice Pharmacy, went on the market for $5.4 million. Dating back to 1857, this structure at the intersection of Grand and Henry, has long served as some sort of deli/grocery/pharmacy for the surrounding public and coop housing. Listings for 527 Grand Street prominently advertise the air rights that come with the purchase, almost 550 feet for a new residential building or over 4,000 for a commercial building –– the sky's the limit for your dream corner property.       Two blocks down Columbia will bring you to Luther Gulick Playground, a desolate stretch behind the Amalgamated Dwellings (one of the oldest housing cooperatives in the United States), named after Luther Gulick, the "Godfather of Basketball", NYC public school advocate, and founder of the Public School Athletic League. The playground was built in the early 1930's, originally as the Ber...

      In a previous post  I discussed the city's plan to demolish the LaGuardia Bathhouse building, one of the oldest public baths in NYC, an attempt in-part to save face in the wake of the recently unveiled plans to raise the East River Park. I anticipate similar news for the "White House", the former Rivington Street Public Baths, which sits squatly in the middle of the Baruch Houses, maybe a 15 minute walk from the LaGuardia Bathhouse building.        A short history: At 118 years old, the Baruch Bathhouse building is not only the oldest public bathhouse in the city, but also the first of its kind to be opened in New York. It's namesake, Dr. Simon Baruch, was an Eastern European Jew who moved to South Carolina in 1855 (at 15 years old) to live with, and work for, a wealthy German-Jewish family. After receiving his medical degree in 1862, Baruch served as a surgeon in the f*cking Confederate army (even treating soldiers for weeks after...

             Today will be the SideWalk Cafe's last day after 33 years on Avenue A. For the last twenty-five of those years, SideWalk has been home to the annual Anti-folk Festival, which will have its last performance at the venue tonight as well as the final open mic night (one of the longest running open-mics in the city). For many, the SideWalk Cafe was the home of the anti-folk scene, providing a stage for the burgeoning careers of many, including Jeffrey Lewis, the Moldy Peaches, Beck, Regina Spektor, and more. While ownership of SideWalk changed hands last year, it was unclear what would be come of it until recently. For those who want a last taste, there are performances going on all day starting at 3pm, with closing ceremonies around midnight.              Yesterday, LES residents learned that the "safest block in NY" will have to relinquish that title, as the Hells Angels prepare to sell th...

            After almost forty years, the simple block letter sign reading "Paper Bag Players" was taken out of the window at 185 East Broadway, almost a year after the building sold for 6.1 million dollars. Founded in 1958 (four years after the start of Joe Papp's "New York Shakespeare Festival", later Shakespeare in the Park, which first held productions at the nearby East River Amphitheater) the Paper Bag Players are a non-profit children's theater group which in many respects attempted to meld aspects of alternative theater with programming for children's education, arriving at 185 East Broadway around 1981. I called and spoke to somebody at Paper Bag Players a week ago and was told they had relocated uptown, having permanently left their space at 185 East Broadway after the building was sold.       I wish to speak briefly on the history of 185 East Broadway, but in doing so must include 183 and 187 East Broadway as well (to the ri...

     The Bialystoker Home for the Aged, a striking Art-Deco building on East Broadway and Clinton, was opened in 1931, a symbol of the Jewish community's dedication to providing care for the significant elderly population of the neighborhood. Between the 1860's and the beginning of the 20th century, the majority of the Jewish population of Bialystok, Poland, (yes you guessed it, the town to which the bialy owes its name) settled in the Lower East Side - numbering in the tens of thousands, they made up a significant portion of the Jewish population of the neighborhood. As the Jewish immigrant community on the LES swelled in the beginning of the 20th century, so too did the need for a community-centered system of elderly care increase, especially one which would cater to the large Orthodox community which made up a significant portion of the older Jews in the area.       In an incredible effort, Yiddish mutual aid societies organized the poor and w...

      Two days ago, the Department of Buildings issued a violation for the 110-year old LaGuardia Bathhouse, declaring its walls in danger of collapsing at any moment - following demolition it will be replaced by a turf field. I had passed by this building, situated next to the Little Flower Playground at Madison and Jefferson (about two blocks from where I was born) around the end of November, originally to take photos of the mural which stretches across its entire height at one end.      An epic depiction of Puerto Rican history and life, the mural moves from scenes of enslaved Africans led in chains by conquistadors, to more contemporary sites of music, community, or figures like Pedro Albizu Campos (a leader in the Puerto Rican independence movement and namesake of the Campos Houses) and Roberto Clemente. Like the large mural depicting scenes of Jewish life, religious themes, images of the Holocaust, and more which once adorned the recently ...

      Situated directly to the left of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe is an unassuming two-story brick building spanning 238-240 East 3rd Street. In the Fall of 2017 this building, owned and operated by the Blue Man Group as a rehearsal and production studio for almost twenty years, hit the market for a tidy $12 million, and by April 2018, EV Grieve reported that permits had been filed for a new 7-story residential development at the site. While these initial permits were rejected, and new ones have since been filed and remain pending, the demolition permits were approved this past July and a plywood barrier was erected around its ground floor in December.       Constructed in 1913 as the American Movies Theater, it was part of a new wave of inexpensive theaters (known as nickelodeons for their 5-cent price) which swept the Lower East Side, an alternative to the vaudeville houses which dominated much of the Jewish theater culture. Hailed by its owner and foun...

      After almost 45 years, Raul's Candy Store has placed "going out of business" signs in their front windows and announced they'll be closing their doors for good at the end of the month. Hearing this news yesterday, I hurried over to see for myself what had become of this local institution, having not been inside in easily over five years. When I arrived, standing under the scaffolding which now covers a good section of the block on B, a small group of men were gathered in front talking amongst each other, and a few feet away an older woman greeted a couple in spanish who were selling clothing and other items hung from the chain-link fence. Pushing open the smooth weathered door of Raul's, I almost knocked into the reporter who had clearly been standing inside for some time, his large video camera set up on a tripod in the middle of the room as he tried unsuccessfully to communicate with Raul and another man who sat comfortably in a set of chairs by the...

As we say goodbye to St. Mark's Comics this month, one of the last older businesses on the block in their original location (having been at 11 St. Mark's for 36 years), I fear a similar fate will soon meet two other neighborhood institutions currently in their own precarious states.  The first is Moishe's Bake Shop, opened by Moishe Pearl in 1974, only a couple years after the Fillmore East closed its doors down the block, and Ratner's Restaurant still held court in the Saul Birns building (in what would become Met Foods before being forced out by NYU). Besides Economy Candy, Moishe's remains the only other stop for sweets from my childhood still standing, and one of two kosher Jewish bakery in the LES. When I heard the news this past December that the building had been sold, I was devastated. Although investor Jay Schwimmer's lease for the property begins in March, there's still no concrete information as to what will happen with Moishe's Bake...

Construction underway at the site of one of the four original Essex Street Market buildings between Stanton and Broome (the stretch pictured here is between the former M. Katz Furniture store and Rivington). The proposed plans for this site, an 8-story building, with retail on the ground floor and 100% of its residential units dedicated to local seniors, are less egregious than the development around it; however, I refuse to celebrate a BILLION-dollar initiative providing 92 studio apartments for seniors as some great act of social planning. These modern developers inherit a legacy of antagonism between residents of the Lower East Side and the city/State. While often lauded as an innovative urban vision on the part of then-mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, the construction of Essex Street Market had as much to do with with conflicts between the early 20th century merchant class and waves of immigrants in Lower Manhattan, as it did “saving and protecting” the pushcart peddlers. Mayor Lagu...

This site, at 259 Clinton Street, is the proposed location for a 730-foot tall tower - one of a grouping of towers approved for construction in the “Two Bridges” neighborhood this past December. Though multiples lawsuits and various community organizations contest the legality of these plans, as of now, the towers should be completed over the next few years. Surrounded by some of the oldest public housing in the country, these towers stand to not only further the displacement of one the last working-class parts of the LES, but work to wrest political control of the neighborhood by inflating the real estate market with luxury housing. The “accessible housing” in these towers continue to be calculated based on median incomes 25% higher than the local community’s, and are few in number.

The shuttered Sunshine Cinema, set to be demolished this spring and give rise to a nine-story glass office building (to be leased at about $100 a square foot). Originally constructed as a Dutch Reformed church in the mid 1800’s, it was transformed into a Yiddish vaudeville house, the “Houston Hippodrome”, in 1908. (Two years after the Hippodrome’s opening, a Romanian Jewish immigrant named Yonah Shimmel, who had been selling knishes out of a pushcart, set up shop a couple doors down, in part to meet the needs of a hungry theater crowd). In 1917 the building became the “Sunshine Theater”, and over the course of the next few decades was re-named a couple times. As Yiddish theater faded in the years following WWII, the building became, among other things, another church, an athletic center, for most of the 70’s and 80’s a warehouse, and for a moment in the mid 90’s, a music venue. It was bought by Landmark Theaters in 2000, and underwent a $12-million dollar restoration before bei...

This is the former P.S. 64 building and location of CHARAS/El Bohio, on 9th between B and C (the Christodora seen on the left). There’s a lot that I could write here, but I will try to condense it to the best of my ability: this building was constructed between 1904 and 1906, crucial years in the evolution of the LES from “Kleindeutschland” into a largely Eastern-European Jewish neighborhood. Designed by C.B.J Snyder, P.S. 64 was an innovative public school building, among other things the first in NYC to provide free professional theater to the public (its grand Auditorium was the site of many productions, talks, and important local political events - supposedly FDR would gauge the strength of his Jewish base by the turnout for his speeches at the school). In the 70’s the city shut the doors and it fell into disrepair. CHARAS, a community organization that had sprung out of Puerto Rican gang culture, alongside Reverend Norman Eddy’s Adopt-A-Building organization (which had recentl...

This shows current construction underway on the “Essex Crossing” area on Delancey between Essex and Clinton. For almost 50 years this area between Grand and Delancey, and Essex and Attorney, sat as a desolate stretch of brick strewn lots, abandoned by the city until a couple years ago. In the late 1950’s, Robert Moses and the Slum Clearance Committee set there eyes on this area, what was then a swathe of predominantly Puerto-Rican and Jewish occupied tenements, as part of their Seward Park Urban Renewal Extension Slum Clearance program. In 1967 this part of the SPURA program was approved, and almost 2,000 residents were forced out of their tenements, promised that they would be able to return to live once new housing was built. However, after demolition, the project was stalled, and only two buildings (now NYCHA housing at 64 Essex and 154 Broome) were ever constructed, housing only about 150 of the original residents.

This first photo is of the damaged remains of what was Beth Hamedrash Hagodol on Norfolk between Grand  and Broome. The oldest Russian Orthodox Jewish congregation in the United States, and the first Eastern European one in NYC, the congregation bought the building that stood at 60-64 Norfolk in 1885, 35 years after its construction as the Norfolk Street Baptist Church. The building has been out of use since 2007, but the rumor is that its owners had wanted to develop the land into residential real-estate, and were frustrated with the limitations posed by the building’s Landmark status; in 2017 the building burnt down under suspicious circumstances, and stands in ruins now, presumably to be converted into condominiums.