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 is an ongoing documentary project on the neighborhood I was born and raised in, with a particular focus on its current re-development and so-called "revitalization".