Six Heritage Tours of the Lower East Side

Six Heritage Tours of the Lower East Side
Author: Ruth Limmer
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 1997-07
Genre: Education
ISBN: 081475130X

An illustrated (and educational) walking guide tour of Manhattan's astonishingly diverse Lower East Side Many of our nation's oldest ethnic communities trace their roots in this country to New York City's Lower East Side. A century ago, travelers to the area could attend a black-faced minstrel show performed by Irishmen, drink German lager, visit Jewish-run gambling houses, and dine on Chinese delicacies, all within a matter of blocks. Long a hub of immigrant cultures, this vibrant section of New York City remains one of the country's most astonishingly diverse neighborhoods. This unique walking guide takes us back to the world of these bustling immigrant enclaves. The historical tours, enlivened by colorful photographs and illustrations, chronicle the evolution of the communities—African, German, Irish, Chinese, Jewish, and Italian—for whom the Lower East Side served as an entryway into America. As participants stroll through one of the world's most heterogeneous and visually stimulating neighborhoods, the tours take them past such historic points as the African burial ground excavation site; Old St. Patrick's Cathedral, the first Catholic cathedral in New York State; the charming Caff Roma, which still serves authentic Italian coffee and desserts much as it did in the early 1900s; the oldest still- standing Jewish house of worship in the City; the site of the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911; and Mott Street, the main thoroughfare around which New York's Chinatown developed. Combining educational historical accounts with enchanting scenic tours, the heritage tours impart a keen sense of the legacies waiting to be discovered in the Lower East Side's remarkable past.

Lower East Side Memories

Lower East Side Memories
Author: Hasia R. Diner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2020-11-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691221707

Manhattan's Lower East Side stands for Jewish experience in America. With the possible exception of African-Americans and Harlem, no ethnic group has been so thoroughly understood and imagined through a particular chunk of space. Despite the fact that most American Jews have never set foot there--and many come from families that did not immigrate through New York much less reside on Hester or Delancey Street--the Lower East Side is firm in their collective memory. Whether they have been there or not, people reminisce about the Lower East Side as the place where life pulsated, bread tasted better, relationships were richer, tradition thrived, and passions flared. This was not always so. During the years now fondly recalled (1880-1930), the neighborhood was only occasionally called the Lower East Side. Though largely populated by Jews from Eastern Europe, it was not ethnically or even religiously homogenous. The tenements, grinding poverty, sweatshops, and packs of roaming children were considered the stuff of social work, not nostalgia and romance. To learn when and why this dark warren of pushcart-lined streets became an icon, Hasia Diner follows a wide trail of high and popular culture. She examines children's stories, novels, movies, museum exhibits, television shows, summer-camp reenactments, walking tours, consumer catalogues, and photos hung on deli walls far from Manhattan. Diner finds that it was after World War II when the Lower East Side was enshrined as the place through which Jews passed from European oppression to the promised land of America. The space became sacred at a time when Jews were simultaneously absorbing the enormity of the Holocaust and finding acceptance and opportunity in an increasingly liberal United States. Particularly after 1960, the Lower East Side gave often secularized and suburban Jews a biblical, yet distinctly American story about who they were and how they got here. Displaying the author's own fondness for the Lower East Side of story books, combined with a commitment to historical truth, Lower East Side Memories is an insightful account of one of our most famous neighborhoods and its power to shape identity.

The Synagogues of New York's Lower East Side:

The Synagogues of New York's Lower East Side:
Author: Gerard R. Wolfe
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2013
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0823250008

The classic book on the Lower East Side's synagogues and their congregations, past and present-now back in print in a completely revised and expanded edition

Roots Too

Roots Too
Author: Matthew Frye Jacobson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 494
Release: 2009-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674039068

In the 1950s, America was seen as a vast melting pot in which white ethnic affiliations were on the wane and a common American identity was the norm. Yet by the 1970s, these white ethnics mobilized around a new version of the epic tale of plucky immigrants making their way in the New World through the sweat of their brow. Although this turn to ethnicity was for many an individual search for familial and psychological identity, Roots Too establishes a broader white social and political consensus arising in response to the political language of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, whites sought renewed status in the romance of Old World travails and New World fortunes. Ellis Island replaced Plymouth Rock as the touchstone of American nationalism. The entire culture embraced the myth of the indomitable white ethnics—who they were and where they had come from—in literature, film, theater, art, music, and scholarship. The language and symbols of hardworking, self-reliant, and ultimately triumphant European immigrants have exerted tremendous force on political movements and public policy debates from affirmative action to contemporary immigration. In order to understand how white primacy in American life survived the withering heat of the Civil Rights movement and multiculturalism, Matthew Frye Jacobson argues for a full exploration of the meaning of the white ethnic revival and the uneasy relationship between inclusion and exclusion that it has engendered in our conceptions of national belonging.

At the Edge of a Dream

At the Edge of a Dream
Author: Lawrence J Epstein
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2007-08-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0787986224

"A Lower East Side Tenement Museum book."

The Civil War Lover's Guide to New York City

The Civil War Lover's Guide to New York City
Author: Bill Morgan
Publisher: Grub Street Publishers
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2013-10-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1611211239

This fascinating illustrated guide is “a must for any Civil War buff visiting or living in New York City” (New York Journal of Books). Few Americans associate New York City with the Civil War, but the most populated metropolitan area in the nation, then and now, is filled with scores of monuments, historical sites, and resources directly related to those four turbulent years. Veteran author Bill Morgan’s The Civil War Lover’s Guide to New York City examines more than 150 of these largely overlooked and often forgotten historical gems. Morgan’s book takes readers on a journey of historical discovery. Walk inside the church where Stonewall Jackson was baptized, visit the building where Lincoln delivered his famous Cooper Union Speech, and marvel that the church built by the great abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher is still used for worship. A dozen Civil War–era forts still stand (the star-shaped bastion upon which the Statue of Liberty rests was a giant supply depot), and one of them sent relief supplies to besieged Fort Sumter in Charleston. Visit the theater where “Dixie” was first performed and the house where Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage. After the war, New York honored the brave men who fought by erecting some of the nation’s most beautiful memorials in honor of William T. Sherman, Admiral David Farragut, and Abraham Lincoln. These and many others still grace parks and plazas around the city. Ulysses S. Grant adopted New York as his home and is buried here in the largest mausoleum in America (which was also the most-visited monument in the country). See the homes where many generals, including Winfield Scott, George B. McClellan, and even Robert E. Lee, once lived. Complete with full-color photos and maps, Morgan’s lavishly illustrated and designed volume is a must-have book for every student of the Civil War and for every visitor to New York City.

Four Streets and a Square: A History of Manhattan and the New York Idea

Four Streets and a Square: A History of Manhattan and the New York Idea
Author: Marc Aronson
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2021-11-09
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1536205931

From a Sibert Medalist comes the epic story of Manhattan—a magical, maddening island “for all” and a microcosm of America. A veteran nonfiction storyteller dives deep into the four-hundred-year history of Manhattan to map the island’s unexpected intersections. Focusing on the evolution of four streets and a square (Wall Street, 42nd Street, West 4th Street, 125th Street, and Union Square) Marc Aronson explores how new ideas and forms of art evolved from social blending. Centuries of conflict—among original Americans and Europeans, slavers and the enslaved, rich and poor, immigrants and native-born—produced segregation, oppression, and violence, but also new ways of speaking, singing, and being American. From the Harlem Renaissance to Hammerstein, from gay pride in the Village to political clashes at Tammany Hall, this clear-eyed pageant of the island’s joys and struggles—enhanced with photos and drawings, multimedia links to music and film, and an extensive bibliography and source notes—is, above all, a love song to Manhattan’s triumphs.

From Abyssinian to Zion

From Abyssinian to Zion
Author: David W. Dunlap
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2004
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780231125437

Published in conjunction with a New York Historical Society exhibition, this photo-filled, pocket-sized guidebook by a "New York Times reporter covers 1,079 houses of worship in New York City. 899 photos & 24 maps.

The Sicilian Project

The Sicilian Project
Author: Jo Danna
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2011-10-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1465369295

SOCIAL SCIENCE Hidden in the hollows of the Madonie Mountain in North Central Sicily are villages where roads and electricity arrive years after appearing in cities and towns. This is a place where the inhabitants are descended from a long line of serfs who were in bondage to a feudal lord and for whom aspects of feudal culture continue to be transmitted by elders to their children. From one such village, Lucia and Dominico D’Anna emigrated to Manhattan’s Lower East Side where author Jo Danna was born. Years later, anthropologist Margaret Mead sent Danna to that village to do her doctoral research. This was a time when winds of change from the modern world were beginning to upset the harmony of a community still rooted in the Middle Ages, where sons and daughters were pitted against elders trying vainly to preserve their ancient traditions, where arranged marriages persist. An example is her Sicilian aunt’s attempts to protect her virtue and the family honor by insisting that she be chaperoned everywhere. The Sicilian Project provides an enchanting, personal look at how rapid culture change splits apart generations and social classes. Efforts of today’s Sicilians to remove an unwanted outcome of medieval times, the Mafia, are also described.

Assessing Urban Design

Assessing Urban Design
Author: Richard W. Berman
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2006
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780739112175

Assessing Urban Design is a search to better understand how people perceive the physical environments that surround them. Touching on issues of urban design, planning, architecture, historic preservation, and tourism, Berman combines theoretical essays and empirical research to explore waterfront sites in Philadelphia and Yokohama.