Your city's "Lower East Side"

[Docere]

Most obviously similar area in Toronto in character would be the Kensington Market/Spadina Avenue area. It was Toronto's main Jewish immigrant area in the early 20th century. Long been a haven for left-wing politics, from the Jewish era (the area elected a Communist as alderman and to the provincial legislature in the 1930s and 1940s) and was later a bastion for hippies, draft dodgers, punks etc. There's also a sizeable Chinese community; Chinatown and Kensington Market flow seamlessly into each other. Lots of students, artists etc. live in the area; Chinese population still significant but has diminished in importance with growth of newer Chinese enclaves.

[muppet]

What is popularly defined by the LES? Is it a boho area? Down-at-heel, cheap rents, but gentrifying due to the draw for creatives

If so pretty much every area of London was boho at some stage, and either become gentrified -Hampstead in the 19th Century, Chelsea in the 20th, Notting Hill at the Millennium, Soho, Farringdon, Hoxton, Whitechapel in the noughties -Dalston, Peckham, Brixton and Hackney going through the process now.

Places that were once working class and high mix of communities, but drew in artists into lofts, and soon became the most expensive ground in the world due to their proximity to the centre that had long ago kicked out the rest of the residentials.

If you look carefully you can see these were once shitty streets a decade or two before:







Or become daggy -some of the most deprived wards in the city but uniformly beautiful in architecture. Rich to poor:

Streatham




Green Lanes, Harringey






Shepherd's Bush

[muppet]

London's current boho's-du-jour are the usual formulae -high crime, high deprivation, but cheap rents draw multiple communities and immigrants, in turn with high creativity and nightlife spots

Peckham






Dalston






Deptford







Walthamstow







Brixton






Basically they look like your typical working class districts but where enclaves of middle class people go to party, above the unwashed.

[mrnyc]

^ umm, sweet jeebus


edit: ok, the ‘burg

[eschaton]

Maybe a New Yorker could jump in here, but when I think "Lower East Side" I think of an area were the traditional urban fabric was mostly destroyed in the mid 20th century to make way for "towers in the park." - though a small portion still maintains the old tenaments.

It's also mostly affordable housing, IIRC and has a large Latino population. Hasn't really gentrified much for that reason.

The historic portion of the LES has been more or less annexed by Chinatown, IIRC.

[Docere]

An interesting article and short documentary about a Jewish man who remained in Kensington Market until the end of his life, and later got involved in urban reform movements. At the end of the video, he says Kensington Market embodied the philosophy of the Statue of Liberty.

https://thecjn.ca/news/david-pinkus-obituary/

[austlar1]

I think a more appropriate title for this thread might be "What was the incubator neighborhood for your city's Jewish community?" Only a few cities had Jewish communities with neighborhoods in any way comparable to the old Lower East Side of Manhattan, but just about every US city had a neighborhood where Jews tended to reside in the late 19th and early 20th Century.

[sopas ej]

I know nothing about the "Lower East Side," so I don't know if or how/why Los Angeles would have an equivalent of it...

[homebucket]

For SF, I consider its Lower East Side to be everything southeast of 280 and south of Islais Creek. So Silver Terrace, Bayview-Hunters Point, Portola, Visitacion Valley, Excelsior, Crocker-Amazon, Mission Terrace, and Outer Mission.

Excelsior is interesting since the streets are named after world capitals and avenues after countries. So someone could live at Athens & Brazil or Lisbon & Russia, or Paris & France, and so on.

Overall, the LES of SF is probably its most ethnically diverse section. Majority working class, family oriented, with multiple generations living in the same household.

[MonkeyRonin]

Kensington/Spadina is a weirdly good analogue for the Lower East Side in many ways. Historically a working class hub of Jewish immigrants that transitioned into more broadly diverse immigrant neighbourhood, to a centre of counter culture, and now trendy but still a bit gritty. Housing projects next door, and adjacent to the city's traditional Chinatown and Little Italy; characterized by narrow streets with once-teeming markets. IIRC pre-WWII it was also the most densely populated neighbourhood in Toronto. The timeline is different, and its built form bears little resemblance, but the comparison works.






https://www.blogto.com/city/2011/07/...ington_market/


Kensington Market today:


Kensington Market, Baldwin St by Jeremy Gilbert, on Flickr


Untitled by Dominic Bugatto, on Flickr


Downtown Toronto by Marcanadian, on Flickr


Spadina Ave. adjacent:


Spadina Ave by Phil Marion (208 million views), on Flickr



But away from that example, I'm not sure if an "LES equivalent" is really a thing, because there's not really any singularly dominant feature that characterizes the place or its history. The Kensington-LES comparison is moreso a fluke than a sharing of any essential characteristic.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by eschaton

Maybe a New Yorker could jump in here, but when I think "Lower East Side" I think of an area were the traditional urban fabric was mostly destroyed in the mid 20th century to make way for "towers in the park." - though a small portion still maintains the old tenaments.

It's also mostly affordable housing, IIRC and has a large Latino population. Hasn't really gentrified much for that reason.

The historic portion of the LES has been more or less annexed by Chinatown, IIRC.

There are two flavors of the LES. There's the "tower in the park" area that you described (mostly east), and the areas where the late 18th century architecture was retained (mostly west). Chinatown is mostly south/southwest of the LES and not really poaching territory from it. It's probably more the opposite as the gentrifying pressure from LES and other nearby areas are encroaching on Chinatown.

The "tower in the park" areas are still heavily Puerto Rican. The neighborhood was mostly Puerto Rican before it started to get gentrified in the late 90s/early 00s. The gentrified areas are mostly restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and housing catering to high income yuppies spilling over from Nolita and SoHo.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

There are two flavors of the LES. There's the "tower in the park" area that you described (mostly east), and the areas where the late 18th century architecture was retained (mostly west). Chinatown is mostly south/southwest of the LES and not really poaching territory from it. It's probably more the opposite as the gentrifying pressure from LES and other nearby areas are encroaching on Chinatown.

The "tower in the park" areas are still heavily Puerto Rican. The neighborhood was mostly Puerto Rican before it started to get gentrified in the late 90s/early 00s. The gentrified areas are mostly restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and housing catering to high income yuppies spilling over from Nolita and SoHo.

Yeah, I was going by the map on Google for the boundaries, which appears to contain a large chunk of Chinatown.

Where does it officially start? East of Essex?

[Crawford]

Chinatown doesn't really have hard boundaries. There are tentacles up to Delancey Street, and yet there are SoHo-type bars right on Mott Street, in the traditional core. I'd say Chinatown was growing from the 1960's through the 1990's, and has since been shrinking. Little Italy, if anything, has been growing in the last few years, but not via Italian immigration, just a cluster of new Italian-American remix-type restaurants.

The LES traditional core is mostly intact and mostly gentrified. Of course it's youth-oriented, not particularly Jewish anymore, even though there's a small Orthodox community that never left. Near the river are urban renewal era housing projects and middle income coop towers, the former traditionally Puerto Rican, but now increasingly Chinese, the latter traditionally Jewish, but now increasingly affluent urbanites.

It seems that the housing projects are kind of a sanctuary for keeping the Chinese presence, as the traditional Chinatown core shrinks. Of course newer mainland immigrants have headed to the half-dozen newer Brooklyn-Queens Chinatowns for decades now.

There are also a number of very large luxury towers going up along the East River. Urban renewal resulted in a lot of underutilzed leftover land, and that land is finally being developed.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

The "tower in the park" areas are still heavily Puerto Rican. The neighborhood was mostly Puerto Rican before it started to get gentrified in the late 90s/early 00s. The gentrified areas are mostly restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and housing catering to high income yuppies spilling over from Nolita and SoHo.

Clinton Street on the LES was a good barometer for 1990's and early 2000's demographic change. When I first started exploring NYC in the 1990's, Clinton Street was still working class Puerto Rican. There was a hipster presence but not the predominant group. By about 2005, Clinton Street was almost completely gentrified.

[Docere]

The Manhattan Chinatown is probably as important to Chinese New Yorkers as the Lower East Side was to Jews and Little Italy was to Italians in 1950. Still a presence and of historical significance but greatly diminished in population and their numbers pale in comparison to outer borough enclaves. New immigrants bypass the area.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Docere

The Manhattan Chinatown is probably as important to Chinese New Yorkers as the Lower East Side was to Jews and Little Italy was to Italians in 1950. Still a presence and of historical significance but greatly diminished in population and their numbers pale in comparison to outer borough enclaves. New immigrants bypass the area.

Maybe. Chinatown is still a hub for Chinese immigrants, but tourism has probably helped it from being completely wiped out by gentrification (same as Little Italy). The identity of the LES as a Jewish enclave has been almost thoroughly wiped, except for a couple of historic delis that are also supported mostly by tourism. That's probably a factor of timing, since the neighborhood changed over during the white flight era.

[Crawford]

Yeah, Manhattan Chinatown is still important and authentic. Like SF Chinatown, the favorable rent laws combined with restrictive zoning and Chinese family ownership, has kept the area fairly intact, and mostly stable, even in the face of extreme RE demand in a super-prime location. But long-term, you see the area slowly getting nibbled away. And it doesn't hold a candle to Flushing, or even Sunset Park, these days. From a tourist/visitor perspective it's still probably the most "impressive" North American Chinatown, and along with SF, one of the two most iconic.

[Docere]

Yeah, an important distinction is that the Ellis Island era immigration had a hard cutoff in 1924. So by 1950, that immigration had been cut off for a quarter-century and Lower Manhattan had long fallen out of favor.

Holocaust survivors came after WWII, and there was immigration from Italy again in the 1950s and 1960s, but they would have bypassed Manhattan and gone to to the outer boroughs where most coethnics lived.

I think Brighton Beach/Coney Island attracted non-Hasidic Displaced Persons, while Hasidim moved to Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park. And after the war, the southern rim of Brooklyn around Bensonhurst became NYC's largest Italian area as large numbers of postwar Italian immigrants (before WWII, East Harlem was the largest Italian community in NYC).

[craigs]

It's interesting to see how people define the Lower East Side, not so much geographically as demographically and culturally. I've only known the LES--I used to stay on Rivington near the Bowery in the late 1980s and early 1990s--as a cheap, dicey, racially/ethnically diverse and more or less bohemian neighborhood that got gentrified pretty quickly in the '90s.

I very distinctly remember driving to New York from Boston one summer, and as we got within NYC radio range, the news was all about the Tompkins Square riot that had continued into a second night--and ended just hours before we arrived. There was a lot of general skittishness that the violence would continue, and perhaps spread to other areas. I'm pretty sure there was a fictionalized version of that in the play Rent.

[Chef]

In Minneapolis it is probably Cedar - Riverside, which is also known as the West Bank. It was never the city's old Jewish neighborhood but has always been a combination of immigrants, bohemian types and college students. In terms of fabric it is a mix of old storefronts and houses and mid 20th century tower in the park developments:

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.9696...7i16384!8i8192