Essex Street Market (Between Rivington and Stanton)

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 Laguardia detested open-air markets and pushcarts, having a vision of a “cleaner and brighter” LES, sanitized of any relationship to its ethnic immigrant past. Confronting tens of thousands of families who made their livings as pushcart peddlers (much less, the even greater number of families relying on the goods they provided), LaGuardia banned the sale of goods on the street and heavily cracked down on vendor licensing. By 1940, when the Essex Street Market opened, it provided only a few hundred vendor stalls for the thousands of pushcart

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Paper Bag Players Sign Disappears From 185 East Broadway

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...

NYCHA's "NextGen Neighborhood" Towers & the Fate of the "White House"

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...

Union of Orthodox Rabbis Building Bought and Emptied –– Artifacts Remain

Wednesday afternoon, a childhood friend of mine –– whose family has been at their apartment on East Broadway since 1956 –– got in touch with me about what sounded like people clearing out the buildings next to his at 237 and 235 East Broadway (Sharis Adath Israel and the former home of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis respectively). When I arrived on the scene that same afternoon, the doors to 235 East Broadway were being shut and two Junklugger trucks were just pulling away from the curb, stacked with what looked like large amounts of furniture. East Broadway was littered with papers that had blown off the back of these trucks, and as I started to pick them up I saw that many of these documents represented records of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis, correspondence in Hebrew and Yiddish, newspaper clippings, pages from religious books, all of which dating back decades. I called Junkluggers and asked if they would be able to intercept any of these documents before they...

A Hidden Lower East Side

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