Assignment task:
Analyze the Lower East Side Atlases below (in Doing History page). Use a great deal of different historical information you have gained this week about the people who live in this area (Lower East Side). At the top of your post, provide the date and place where a imagined person lived. The date is important because you know from reading this piece that something begins to happen in 1870. So the date choose will dictate what to create (your date must be between 1867 and 1900). The place will be somewhere on the Atlas I provided (you can describe the place like on this street, between these two streets.
Then in bulleted form, list 15 different pieces of evidence related to your post (that you will be using to write your description). Cite where in this class you got them. Then in a single paragraph, describe a day in the life of the person you are creating. You should include their name, their occupation, what they do/see/experience to get to work/while at work (when, how). What they do on "off work" times, etc.
The Historical Atlas of New York City by Eric Homberger
"Between 1880 and 1920 most of the two million Jews from Russia, Poland, Austria-Hungary and the Balkans who arrived in the United States settled in New York and made their homes on the lower East Side. They lived in the thousands of tenements thrown up cheaply and quickly by small builders. They were usually five stories tall, with four tiny apartments on each floor. Large families and their borders were squeezed into the ill-lit and crowded rooms. With little fresh air and minimal plumbing, sanitation was inadequate and health inevitably suffered. High infant mortality rates and widespread tuberculosis testified to the shocking conditions."
Nonetheless, Jewish culture and religion flourished. Hundreds of synagogues and religious schools were established, ritual baths built, and religious goods manufactured. There were Yiddish theater companies and literary societies, Yiddish and Hebrew publishers, and Yiddish newspapers: the most famous was The Jewish Daily Forward (1898) located in its own building at 175 East Broadway. Jews who had emigrated from the same village or town or city in Europe set up landsmenschaften, social and mutual aid groups which provided insurance, burial benefits and even cemeteries. New arrivals in the lower East Side settled into their new lives with the assistance of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society."
Jewish immigrants earned their living in a variety of ways. They sold goods from pushcarts, operated restaurants, cafeterias, and small retail shops and a great number worked in the garment industry. Children and adults often labored from dawn to dusk in their small apartments doing piecework, paid by the number of items they had completed on a given assignment. They also worked in sweatshops --workshops that were squeezed into tenement apartments or loft buildings -- and were crowded, poorly-lit, stifling in summer and cold in winter. Wages were low and hours long. The sweatshops were fertile ground for union organizing -- the ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union) was established in 1900 -- but real progress was not made until the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory fire on March 25, 1911, when 146 immigrants, many who were Jews, died. Their deaths eventually led to many reforms in both building and fire-code safety regulations."
Jewish immigrants were eager to be assimilated into American life, and they attended night schools for citizenship classes and English. These were offered in the public schools and also at neighborhood settlement houses which served all ethnic groups. Between 1890 and 1910, more than two dozen were opened on the lower East Side alone. Among the first were the University Settlement (1886), the College Settlement (1889) and the Nurses' Settlement (1893, later the Henry St. Settlement). Here college aged men and women who wanted to help improve conditions to the lower East Side worked for housing, reform, public health, services, and improved recreational and educational facilities. Children benefitted form kindergartens, summer camps and playgrounds as well as the visiting Nurse Service on Henry Street."
The Danish photographer and journalist Jacob Riis led campaigns to reform conditions in the lower East Side. The need for open space was particularly acute, for play areas were to be found only on rooftops, in the streets, and down insalubrious alleys. As a result of campaigns, some of the worst tenements were cleared in the 1890s to build Seward and Mulberry Bend parks, and playgrounds were inserted throughout the ear on vacant lots.
Lower East Side, Hester Street 1910
Eric Homberger, The Historical Atlas of New York City (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), 132-133.
I also wanted you to see that there was active misinformation (that's a nice word for "made up lies") that fed the zenophobic inclination of the times. This is from Adam Hochschild's American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis published in 2022.
"In the 1890s there appeared a fraudulent document, Instructions to Ctholics, supposedly from the pope, which contained a secret plan for how Rome's faithful were to seize control. An anti-Catholic weekly, The Menace, would eventually have a circulation of more than 1.5 million.
Nativist feeling, expressed by cartoons of sinister invaders from the East, found a new target in Chinese immigrants arriving on the West Coast. The Chinese Exlsion Act of 1882 became the first significant law restricting immigration to the United States. In 1885, a white mob massacred 28 Chinese coal miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, burning some of them alive.
Resentment soon flamed up again, stronger than ever, as immigrant began arriving from new sources. The United States, like the 13 colonies before it, had long been dominated by Protestants whose ancestors were from Grat Britain and northwestern Euroope. But by 1890, most of those coming ashore at Ellis Island and other ports of entry, the women in kerchiefs, the men in fur hats or workmen's brimmed caps, were not from Italy, eastern Europe, or the Russian Empire. And they were Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Jewish. More than four million arrived on American shores form Italy alone in the 35 years before the First World War. By 1900, the majority of men in Manhattan over the age of 21 were foreign-born" (Hochschild, 47-48).
So what you have here from Hochschild is an overall picture of how immigrants are seen and treated at the turn of the twentieth century. This passage brings the West Coast into the national sentiment: Anti Foreign, and foreign was "defined as" not British and not Protestant, and therefore, "not white enough." See how fluid the term "white" is here? And by the way, what is meant by the Eastern Orthodox is the original Christian chruch. The first schism within the Christian church was in 1054, through an excommunicaton, and the establishment of two different versions of Christianity: The Eastern Orthodox and the Western Church. This is not the schism which gives us Catholicism and various Protestantisms (Luther's Protest) which happened five centuries later in 1517.
One last thing. I wanted to include a little something on the Gangs of New York, but my husband loved Homberger's book so much, I don't have the heart to take my book back from him. Homberger has this atlas that includes where gangs ruled, and points where someone was assassinated gang style. But I'll tell you this. There were two sets of gangs that dominated in the Lower East Side during the periods you are working with:
South West (of the Lower East Side)
Forty Thieves 1820s
Shirt Tails 1820s - 1850s
Plug Uglies 1820 s- 1890s
Dead Rabbits 1820s - 1870s
Whyos 1874-1890
Five Points Gang 1890s - 1905
South East (of the Lower East Side)
Bowery Boys 1830s
Dutch Mob 1860s - 1870s
Hook Gang (Corlear's Hook) 1860s - 1870s
The Eastmans 1890s - 1905
Al Capone (Chicago) said he got his start in the Five Pointers, but there are some experts who doubt that boast.