Lower East Side : A Guide to Its Jewish Past with Ninety-Nine New Photographs

by Ronald Sanders. Photographs by Edmund V. Gillon

• ISBN13: 9780486238715
• ISBN10: 0486238717
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 1980-01-01
• Publisher: Dover Publications

Summary

For nearly half a century, from the 1870s to 1920, wave after wave of Jewish immigrants poured into New York City. Fleeing poverty and persecution, yearning for freedom, Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe sought a new life in the teeming streets of New York's Lower East Side. With toil, sweat and dreams they built a rich and vital subculture -- one that produced a long line of prominent Americans, including Samuel Gompers, George Gershwin, Abraham Cahan, Jacob Epstein, Paul Muni, Jan Peerce, Eddie Cantor and countless others. This volume of evocative photographs, together with Ronald Sanders' lucid and informative text, focuses on the turbulent and colorful Jewish past as it survives in numerous structures and locales: synagogues, settlement houses, theaters, parks, restaurants, schools and cemeteries. Most of the photographs are contemporary, and in geographical order, making this an ideal guidebook to an unusually rich and unexplored area of New York life. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
"The Jewish Rialto"	p. 13
Byways of the Past and Present	p. 19
East Houston, Rivington and Orchard Streets	p. 30
Delancey, Grand and Essex Streets	p. 42
The Old Center	p. 53
East of Straus Square	p. 60
Westward from Straus Square	p. 70
On the Outskirts	p. 79
Bibliography	p. 85
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.