Posted Nov 15, 2022, 6:50 AM
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Join Date: May 2019
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 6,825
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From Wikipedia:
Quote:
The bulk of immigrants who came to New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries came to the Lower East Side, moving into crowded tenements there. By the 1840s, large numbers of German immigrants settled in the area, and a large part of it became known as "Little Germany" or "Kleindeutschland". This was followed by groups of Italians and Eastern European Jews, as well as Greeks, Hungarians, Poles, Romanians, Russians, Slovaks and Ukrainians, each of whom settled in relatively homogeneous enclaves. By 1920, the Jewish neighborhood was one of the largest of these ethnic groupings . . . .
By the turn of the twentieth century, the neighborhood had become closely associated with radical politics, such as anarchism, socialism and communism, and was also known as a place where many popular performers had grown up . . . . Later, more radical artists such as the Beat poets and writers were drawn to the neighborhood – especially the parts which later became the East Village – by the inexpensive housing and cheap food.
The German population decreased in the early twentieth century as a result of the General Slocum disaster and due to anti-German sentiment prompted by World War I. After World War II, the Lower East Side became New York City's first racially integrated neighborhood with the influx of African Americans and Puerto Ricans. Areas where Spanish speaking was predominant began to be called Loisaida.
By the 1960s, the influence of the Jewish and eastern European groups declined as many of these residents had left the area, while other ethnic groups had coalesced into separate neighborhoods, such as Little Italy. The Lower East Side then experienced a period of "persistent poverty, crime, drugs, and abandoned housing". . . .
By the 1980s, the Lower East Side had begun to stabilize after its period of decline, and once again began to attract students, artists and adventurous members of the middle-class, as well as immigrants from countries such as Bangladesh, China, the Dominican Republic, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Poland.
In the early 2000s, the gentrification of the East Village spread to the Lower East Side proper, making it one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Manhattan . . . .
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The Lower East Side has a centuries-long history of being many things to many different kinds of people, and the former Jewish enclave there was part of that story--but not the exclusive story, or more important than any other. Not by a longshot. I don't know why you are using the Lower East Side as shorthand for "Jewish" considering that historical reality.
Fun fact: there was a part of the LES called Corlear's Hook, and per Wikipedia, as early as 1816, Corlears Hook was notorious for streetwalkers, "a resort for the lewd and abandoned of both sexes", and in 1821 its "streets abounding every night with preconcerted groups of thieves and prostitutes" were noted by the "Christian Herald". In the course of the 19th century they came to be called hookers.
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