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New York - New York City - Manhattan - Lower East Side Area: Fulton St. ( South St. to Pearl St.) and Franklin St. ( Baxter St. to Broadway) on the south to 14th St. on the north; from the East River west to Pearl St. and Broadway; excluding Chinatown. The dramatic, intensely human story of the Lower East Side is a familiar chapter in the epic of America; a host of writers -- some seeking out the Lower East Side and others originating there -- have described its people. Here have dwelt the people whose hands built the city's elevateds, subways, tubes, bridges, and skyscrapers. Its two square miles of tenements and crowded streets magnify all the problems and conflicts of big-city life. The inhuman conditions of its slums and sweatshops brought about the first organized social work in America. Crowded, noisy, squalid in many of its aspects, no other section of the city is more typical of New York. The district is best known as a slum, as a community of immigrants, and as a ghetto; yet not all of the district is blighted, not all of its people are of foreign stock, and not all are Jewish. From its dark tenements, generations of American workers of many different national origins and an amazing number of public figures have emerged; politicians, artists, gangsters, composers, prize fighters, labor leaders. One of the first New York tenements designed for multifamily use was erected in the Lower East Side in 1833, on Water Street near Corlears Hook. The most notorious "modern" slum, however, was Five Points -centered at the intersection of Baxter, Worth, and Park Streets -- flourishing when Charles Dickens described it in 1842. The southern part of the Lower East Side soon shared the conditions if not the notoriety of Five Points and, thanks to potato rot, political oppression, and pogroms, the northern part took on the same character, as the last great waves of the "old immigration" and the first great waves of the "new immigration" surged in. The overwhelming majority of the tenements still standing are of the kind banned in 1901. Many antedate the Civil War, but most were built in the 1880's and 1890's. Two million Irish, fleeing famine, migrated to America between 1846 and 1860, and many of them settled, at least temporarily, in the Lower East Side. It was the Lower East Side that produced Alfred E. Smith, fourtime Democratic governor of New York State, Democratic candidate for President in 1928, and a founder of the American Liberty League; and three of the best-known sachems of the originally anti-Irish Tammany Hall: "Boss" Tweed, leading figure of the infamous Tweed Ring, "Honest John" Kelley, and Charlie Murphy. From 1811 to 1867 the Tammany Wigwam was located at Chatham and Frankfort Streets. Large numbers of Irish workers went into the shipping and building trades, and later into the police, fire, and other city departments. The first of thousands of Germans came to the Lower East Side at the middle of the nineteenth century. Many of them were skilled workers with a background of labor organization, and they played an important role in the trade union movement in New York: they formed the General German Workingmen's Union, which in 1867 affiliated with the International Workmen's Association (The First International); they founded the Free Workers' School (housed in Faulhaber's Hall on Second Avenue), one of the first of its kind in the United States; they established labor and progressive newspapers. German Jews became traders, professionals, clothing manufacturers, furriers, jewelers. By 1880 they were the dominant element in New York's Jewish community of eighty thousand. In 1881 the great influx of Italians, Russians, Rumanians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Greeks, Poles, and Turks, into the Lower East Side began. Between 1881 and 1910, 1,562,000 Jews came to America. Many of these Jewish emigrants, chiefly from Russia, settled on the Lower East Side, forming the world's largest Jewish community. The Jews, like other peoples in the region, grouped themselves in more or less compact colonies determined by language, customs, country or province of origin. Little Rumania, for instance, centering around Allen Street, was one of the most distinct and interesting quarters during the 1890's. Most of these new Jewish immigrants worked as peddlers or entered the expanding needle trades. Workshops, established in the tenements, enslaved entire families, and the sweatshop era began, with its disease and degradation. Many of these workers succeeded after a time in improving their position, and a few became large-scale employers themselves. Through appalling sacrifice, some Jewish families realized their fondest aspiration: a son became a doctor, teacher, or lawyer. Those who rose above poverty moved to more desirable localities, but "greenhorns" -- new and bewildered immigrants, Jew and Gentile -- continued to augment the population of the East Side until the third decade of this century, when quota laws severely restricted further immigration. During that decade the population remained between five and six hundred thousand. An East Side family was often divided against itself by the conflict of the old and the new. "Many of us were transient, impatient aliens in our parents' home," Samuel Ornitz records in Haunch, Paunch and Jowl ( 1923), a semi-autobiographical novel of the Lower East Side. There were almost no play areas. Boys formed themselves into gangs, roamed the streets in search of mischief and money; many became gangsters. One of the toughest thugs in the city's history, "Monk" Eastman, rose at the turn of the century, commanding hundreds of gunmen. From his headquarters on Chrystie Street came in a later period, Johnny Torrio, "Legs" Diamond, and Jacob ("Little Augie") Orgen. During the latter part of the nineteenth century the writings of Jacob Riis and others stimulated the housing reform movement and socialwelfare work. The Neighborhood Guild, first of the many settlement houses established in the Lower East Side, was founded in 1886 at 147 Forsythe Street. Two years later East Siders themselves took an important step toward combating their intolerable living conditions by forming the United Hebrew Trades, a trade union body. Today such centers as Christadora House, the Church of All Nations, the Educational Alliance, Grand Street Settlement, Henry Street Settlement, Stuyvesant Neighborhood House, and University Settlement are invaluable community agencies. Unionism, capitalism, socialism, and communism have been thoroughly discussed in the streets and parks of the East Side. Yet Tammany Hall has reigned almost uninterruptedly over the actual political life of the area. Anarchist and Socialist papers and periodicals, some shortlived, others continuing to appear for many years, have been issued in many languages. Johann Most published Freiheit, and later ( 1906) Emma Goldman founded Mother Earth. Under the editorship of Abraham Cahan , the Jewish Daily Forward, a labor paper in Jewish, has been most influential, and still has a circulation of about 170,000. The Socialist Party's work was rewarded when Meyer London was elected to Congress in 1914, and again in 1918 when three Socialist assemblymen were elected. Morris Hillquit, leader of the Socialist Party for many years after the war, was from the locality. B. Charney Vladeck, of the Forward, was elected majority leader of the City Council in 1937, the year the East Side assembly districts cast 14 per cent of their votes for the American Labor Party as against 8.5 per cent in the rest of Manhattan. The intellectuals among the immigrants brought with them their oldworld avidity for culture, and their influence on the East Side provided thousands with their first contact with art and literature. A lunch hour at a garment factory would find many of the workers absorbed in Tolstoy, Kropotkin, or Heine. Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Gorky, and other European dramatists had their American premiers in the ghetto. While Broadway was receiving Ibsen coldly, the East Side was enthusiastically applauding Nazimova in Ghosts. The ghetto has produced a remarkable Jewish literature of its own, much of it mirroring the harsh life of sweatshop and slum. The Yiddish poet, with his relatively small public, ordinarily sells many more copies of his works than a poet who writes in English. Probably the two most widely read books in English about the East Side by East Siders are Abraham Cahan novel, the Rise of David Levinsky ( 1917), and Michael Gold's autobiographical Jews Without Money ( 1930). Fannie Hurst, born in St. Louis, lived in the East Side while gathering material for her stories. "Humoresque," dealing with this locale, is perhaps the best known. Jo Davidson and Jacob Epstein, sculptors, and Max Weber, the painter, are from the East Side, as are scores of younger artists whose works have gained wide recognition. Jazz owes much to the district where George and Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin started their careers. The wise-cracking brand of humor, and much language which has become part of popular speech, have roots in the Lower East Side. Such expressions as gabfest, plunderbund, it listens well, bum, dumb (in the sense of stupid), come from the Germans; the Jews have given words like kibitzer, kosher, mazuma, phooey; and the Irish, shillelagh, smithereens, ballyhoo, and shehang. The district's environment has influenced Jimmy Durante, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Fannie Brice, George Jessel, Lionel Stander, Milton Berle, and the Marx brothers. Immigration quotas at the beginning of the 1920's brought a great change to the district. No longer maintained by new arrivals, the population dropped from well over a half million in 1920 to less than a quarter million in 1938. Land values have declined and many of the rookeries are no longer profitable. Some have been condemned and demolished, leaving vacant lots used as playgrounds. The building of the Williamlurg and Manhattan bridges (opened in 1903 and 1909) cut swaths through the close-packed dwellings; and recently Chrystie, Allen, and part of East Houston Streets have been widened, removing blocks of tenements. The East River Drive and its park have transformed the water front north of the Williamsburg Bridge. The Amalgamated Dwellings, built in the 1920's, and Knickerbocker Village, built in the 1930's, replaced some of the worst houses. But throughout most of the section the smothering heat of summer still drives East Siders to the windows and fire escapes of their ill-ventilated dwellings, to the docks along the river or to the crowded smelly streets, where half-naked children cool themselves in streams from fire hydrants. In winter, basement merchants sell coal and kindling in minute portions for the stoves of unheated cold-water flats. 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