The Lower East Side has been home to some of the city's most iconic restaurants, shopping venues, and architecture. The neighborhood has also welcomed generations of immigrants, from newly arrived Italians and Jews to today's Latino and Asian newcomers. This history has become somewhat obscured, however, as the Lower East Side can appear more hip than historic, with wealth and gentrification changing the character of the neighborhood. Chronicling these developments, along with the hidden gems that still speak of a vibrant immigrant identity, Joyce Mendelsohn provides a complete guide to the Lower East Side of then and now. After an extensive history that stretches back to Manhattan's first settlers, Mendelsohn offers 5 self-guided walking tours, including a new passage through the Bowery, that take the reader to more than 150 sites and highlight the dynamics of a community of contrasts: aged tenements nestled among luxury apartment towers abut historic churches and synagogues. With updated and revised maps, historical data, and an entirely new community to explore, Mendelsohn writes a brand-new chapter in an old New York story.

"Life on the Lower East Side, the first monograph of Lepkoff's work, highlights the area between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges from the Bowery to the East River. Over 170 beautifully reproduced duotone photographs and essays by Peter E. Dans and Suzanne Wasserman uncover a forgotten time and place and reveal how the Lower East Side remains both unaltered and forever changed."--BOOK JACKET.

A collection of personal memories and insights from 25 longtime residents of this storied and ever-changing NYC neighborhood. The Lower East Side is one of Manhattan’s most vibrant neighborhoods. For centuries, it has been home to hundreds of enclaves of immigrants from every part of the world. As they became New Yorkers, the neighborhood has in turn become infused with their cultures, foods, traditions, and personalities. In this book, local historians Eric Ferrara and Nina Howes document the stories and remembrances of twenty-five Lower East Side residents who helped make it what it is today. From childhood memories with family (but without running water) to observations of the constantly changing city, Lower East Side Oral Histories reveals this larger-than-life corner of New York through the eyes and voices of the people who lived there.

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

Historic guide to the infamous criminals and counterculture of the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York City.

Through direct engagement with gardeners, activists, and residents, Miranda Martinez shows the breadth and diversity of the community gardening movement and how these groups inserted themselves into local politics and development to create change. She demonstrates how real people are effective as social forces amid large scale urban change and looks at the complexities and contradictions involved in transformations of urban neighborhoods. One of the most important contributions of this study is its focus on the Puerto Ricans of the Lower East Side and their struggle to sustain its Latinidad. It goes deeply into the ethnic and cultural significance at the neighborhood and personal level to show the contradictory meanings of gentrification to Puerto Ricans and others, and more importantly, the ways that the history and culture of Puerto Ricans are ignored, devalued, and erased. By going to the grassroots, this book vividly demonstrates how Puerto Ricans interact with the global and local trends involved in gentrification and how the struggles against displacement can alter the boundaries of the process.