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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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...

Former "Mayor of James Street" and Gangster-turned-Undertaker, 'Roxie' Vanella's Funeral Chapel Sells For $7.8M

If you end up down on Madison and Saint James, near the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, you've stepped into the area of the Lower East Side formerly known as the Fourth Ward. With Five Points just to its west, the Fourth Ward composed part of the East River shoreline and is generally folded in with the old Corlear's Hook neighborhood (also known as the "Hook", where once almost one hundred brothels were located and the term "hooker" was coined). This area of Lower Manhattan, around the time of Robert "Roxie" Vanella's birth in 1883, was largely occupied by ship-builders, dockyards, and the assorted tenement. The triangular block that Vanella's Funeral Chapel sits on also houses the former St. James School, noted as the only site of Alfred E. Smith's formal education (who was only ten years Vanella's senior), and neighbors the St. James Church, the second oldest Roman Catholic building in NYC and the home of the Ancien...

UPDATE: Hells Angels Leave Third Street for Greener Pastures

Two mornings ago, EV Grieve broke the news that the Hells Angels appeared to have vacated their clubhouse on Third after 50 years –– all identifying marks had been removed or painted over, leaving only the "77" across the now completely black entryway. The group's sudden departure from a block and neighborhood it had called home since the late 60's has been met with a genuine mixed array of emotions and reactions. As the EV Grieve's article was shared across various Lower East Side pages on Facebook yesterday, numbers of people mourned this move as another symbol of the erasure of the neighborhood's culture, or the further capitulation to real-estate developers, while numbers of others implored commenters to explain why we should lament the loss of an organization with such a violent criminal past. A similar dynamic often arises within conversations around the Lower East Side's long and extensive history of gang activity, drug use, prostituti...

A Hidden Lower East Side

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