Imagine you are standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, the lastest marvel of American engineering, looking westward toward Manhattan on a warm summer evening. This dark area is the Lower East Side. The narrow streets are crowded and noisy, with pedestrian traffic, pushcarts, and horse-drawn wagons competing for room on the muddy cobble. Surrounding on all sides are dark, shabby tenements, five and six storey walk-ups, most of them without plumbing.
American history lends a touch of irony to the scene.
In the 18th Century, much of the land that is now the Lower East Side was part of a farm belonging to the Delancey family. A provision in a family will stated that the entire section from Rivington to Broome Street, and from Forsyth to Essex, should revert in perpetuity to the City of New York for use as a park. But because the Delanceys were Tories at the time of the Revolution their lands were confiscated, and the Lower East Side developed into what we now see in our mind's eye. In the twenty or so square blocks that make up the heart of the Lower East Side, upwards of 3,000 people live in a single square block. And in some respects, they had never known such freedom.