➊THE FORMER JEWISH DAILY FORWARD BUILDING (175 East Broadway)—This ten-story building was erected in 1911, and became a major center of labor organizing on the Lower East Side (see photo on page 151). Founded in 1897 by Abraham Cahan, the Forward grew to a daily circulation of 225,000, the largest circulating Yiddish newspaper in the world. Mr. Cahan was an anarchist, and then a Socialist, who gave what is believed to be the first Socialist speech in Yiddish in North America in 1882, shortly after his arrival through Castle Garden (see site 14 of the Lower East Side II Tour).
This building was more than simply a newspaper headquarters; it was a center for activism. When workers went on strike the newspaper published lists of companies to boycott and allowed their building to be used as strike headquarters. The present-day union-busting Daily News and New York Times don’t quite have this same spirit.
When Socialist Party Congressman Meyer London won his first election, the results were posted from the windows at two in the morning and thousands gathered in front of a smiling Meyer London, and marched throughout the Lower East Side. When lynchings increased against African Americans in the 1910s, the Forward compared them to the pogroms against Jews in Czarist Russia.
The “Bundle of Letters” column (Bintel Brief in Yiddish) fielded questions from the immigrants about this strange new country and its customs, and a collection of letters has since been published in a book that serves as a sociological study of the era. (A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward [Ballantine, 1971].)
The Forward also published a “Gallery of Missing Husbands” as poverty forced a desertion rate of ten percent of Jewish husbands; that issue is currently important in the African-American community, with many racists claiming it’s the result of something inherent in African Americans.
In 1918, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, career radical, organized a founding conference of the Workers Liberty Defense Union, which defended members of the IWW, other unions, and radical political party members jailed for their opposition to U.S. entry into WWI. Later, in 1920, she organized the first meeting of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, which had representatives from the Socialist Party, Communist Party, and IWW. The conference was held at Webster Hall in the East Village and the Workers Liberty Defense Union had offices at 138 West Thirteenth Street.
The Forward has since moved to 125 Maiden Lane in the Wall Street area and has become more conservative. Four marble busts are still visible above the entrance to the building and are busts of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle (founder of the General Association of German Workers), and Wilhelm Liebknicht (member of the German Social Democratic Party).
This part of East Broadway and Rutgers Street—anchored by the traffic triangle in the center—was called Rutgers Square, but was renamed Strauss Square, for Nathan Strauss, in 1931. He was a partner in R. H. Macy’s Department Store, known for his great philanthropy, but also a union buster who, in 1906, fired waitresses organizing at Macy’s Department Store in a campaign supported by the Women’s Trade Union League (see Lower East Side II and East Village I Tours).
The national head of the Socialist Party, Eugene Debs, held a rally in what was then called Rutgers Square in 1908, during his presidential campaign. In a 1920 election, he received, from jail, more than 900,000 votes for president. Had he won, he would have reversed the typical political career trajectory by going to jail before assuming office.
➋THE GARDEN CAFETERIA BUILDING (165 East Broadway)—The Garden Cafeteria (1911–1983) was a place where one could order a cheap meal, sit all day arguing over things like anarchism versus socialism, U.S. entry into World War I, or who to support in the upcoming elections. It became a Chinese restaurant for over 30 years (and you can’t get more Jewish than that) until the Wing Shoon Restaurant closed in 2014. The bathroom in the basement had the real feel and look of the early twentieth century to it and hopefully, the building won’t become another Starbucks.
Site of the old Garden Cafeteria on East Broadway. PHOTO BY BRUCE KAYTON
The Workmen’s Circle and the Jewish Daily Forward held meetings here, and some of the famous people who have eaten here include Isaac Bashevis Singer, Leon Trotsky, and Fidel Castro (Castro lived on West Eighty-second Street for several months in 1948). There was a beautiful “Wall of Respect for Women” mural on the west side of the building next to the subway entrance, but unfortunately it’s been painted over and remains a blank white wall today (symbolic of how women’s history is treated).
➌THE JEWISH DAILY NEWS BUILDING (185 East Broadway)—This newspaper was one of the many newspapers on East Broadway that made up the “Yiddish Newspaper Row” of New York City and it brought the famous Socialist, Communist, and birth control advocate Rose Pastor Stokes to New York City. Ms. Stokes grew up in England and then Cleveland, Ohio, working ten to eleven hours per day in local factories from the age of eleven. She was one of five children, and her family was so poor that they used to divide the bread into inch-long pieces. Her father and then her stepfather abandoned the family. When Ms. Stokes tracked down her father on the Lower East Side, he promptly moved out west after a brief, awkward meeting with her.
She started to write letters to the Jewish Daily News about working-class life in Cleveland. In 1903, they hired her to work for the paper at the salary of $15 per week, and she started her New York City worklife in this building. This poor Jewish girl went on to meet and marry James Graham Phelps Stokes, the millionaire head of the University Settlement (see Lower East Side II Tour) in a marriage that was covered on the front page of The New York Times. Ms. Stokes had to quit her factory job at that point because of the publicity, but she joined the Socialist Party and went on speaking tours for them.
She spoke at a rally at the Bowery and Rivington Street, where more than twenty thousand shirtwaist makers were out on strike. Ms. Stokes was a founding member of the Women’s Trade Union League, an early member of the National Birth Control League, and later a founding member of what became the American Communist Party. She ran for Congress on the Communist Party line in 1920, was arrested for voting in Greenwich Village in 1918 (see Greenwich Village II Tour), and faced a long prison term for a letter to the editor of a Kansas newspaper opposing U.S. entry into WWI.
She later divorced her millionaire husband and married a union organizer with whom she lived in Chelsea for many years. She finally died of breast cancer in Germany in 1933, where she was receiving radiation therapy. She left $2,000 for a rest home for radicals in her Westport, Connecticut, home, but there wasn’t enough money to maintain it.
➍EDUCATIONAL ALLIANCE (197 East Broadway)— Before the large Eastern European Jewish immigration wave, a smaller, more economically secure group of German Jews emigrated, landing in New York and many other cities around the country.
These “Uptown Jews” were afraid of an anti-Semitic backlash in response to the immigration of millions of poor Jews. In order to deal with this, the German Jews set up an entire generation of social service agencies and settlement houses to quickly Americanize this “funny-looking, funny-talking, unkempt” group. The Educational Alliance was at the center of this effort, offering classes in English and typing, dance, art, music, and how to acquire citizenship.
Yiddish was banned at the Educational Alliance for a time, even as Abraham Cahan ran the largest Yiddish newspaper in the world on the next block.
Mark Twain gave readings here, Meyer London took part in English-language political debates, and future blacklisted actor Zero Mostel learned to paint here as a child. Rose Pastor Stokes was the leader of a girl’s book club that met here. As was true of many buildings on the Lower East Side at this time, the rooftop was a place for neighborhood residents to hang out and escape the overcrowded streets below.
Bialystoker home for the aged.
PHOTO BY MYRNA KAYTON
Across the street at the Seward Park Library (192 East Broadway), a beautiful green cast iron bar adjoins the roof and is a reminder of when the rooftops were major social centers, before television sent everyone to their rooms at night.
The library went up in 1910, and had long lines of immigrants waiting outside to get in. Currently the most heavily used branch library in New York City is the Flushing Library, serving the Asian immigrant community.
➎BIALYSTOKER HOME FOR THE AGED (228 and 232 East Broadway)—The taller art deco building was erected in 1932, and the newer annex went up in 1966. It sports a beautiful, but fading, mural of Jewish life, starting with the immigrants on the boats to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union picketline and the memorial to the holocaust. Over 100 senior citizens resided here until the home closed down in 2011 after running up a $14 million deficit. The large building was landmarked in 2013. The annex was a medical center until being sold for $1.5 million in 2010.
Across the street stands some of the remnants of what the neighborhood used to look like. Many of the original buildings served as small synagogues and are reminders of the over 600 orthodox synagogues that dotted the Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century.
➏HENRY STREET SETTLEMENT (263, 265, and 267 Henry Street)—Founded in 1893 by Lillian Wald, the Henry Street Settlement has done everything for immigrants from setting up a credit union, offering job counseling, getting doctors in the public schools, building low-cost housing for the community, and getting kids into camp.
Ms. Wald was originally from a rich German Jewish family, but felt very strongly, like Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, that one should live in the community in which one worked. Ms. Wald’s Traveling Nurse Service became a staple on the Lower East Side, with classic pictures of nurses in long dresses jumping from roof to roof to make their rounds. Ms. Wald was an original signer of the call to form the NAACP, and everyone from Theodore Roosevelt to Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin has visited the settlement.
In 1912, representatives of the Industrial Workers of the World spoke here about the famous Lawrence, Massachusetts, “Bread and Roses” strike.
The mural of Jewish life that adorns the Bialystoker home.
PHOTO BY MYRNA KAYTON
In 1914, Sidney Hillman lived here after being invited by Abraham Cahan to work with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Mr. Hillman became a union activist in 1910, during the forty thousand–strong garment worker strike in Chicago against the giant sweatshop company of Hart, Schaffner, and Marx. He later worked with the United Garment Workers of America, a conservative AFL union, and took their socialist left wing into the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, which he founded in 1914 (see East Village I Tour).
By 1919, the union grew to include 138,000 members and Mr. Hillman met Trotsky and Lenin, and endorsed Eugene Debs for president in 1920. In the 1930s, Mr. Hillman was a founding member of the American Labor Party. He became an advisor to New York Governor Lehman and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Mr. Hillman was an organizer with the Socialist Bund back in Russia, getting arrested in 1904 for leading the first public demonstration of the Bund through the streets of Kovno. He saw himself as a worker first and a Jew second. He spoke with a thick Yiddish accent and was the target of anti-Semites as a labor advisor for the government.
The Hillman Houses (500, 530, and 550) on Grand Street are named for him and were erected in 1951. After several mergers the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America are now a part of UNITE HERE!, which included a merger with the ILGWU in 1995.
Mr. Hillman died in 1946.
➐78 CLINTON STREET—This tenement housed one of the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, the horrible sweatshop fire that killed 146 workers, mainly Jewish women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three (see Greenwich Village I Tour).
The number of people killed was so high that the government didn’t have enough coffins on hand. They took the bodies to a dark Twenty-sixth Street pier on the East River and by 7:00 PM that night more than two thousand people waited at the gate to identify loved ones who had been killed. Horsedrawn ambulances and police wagons drove up to the gates and deposited bodies inside. By midnight, more than 130 bodies had been processed, and the crowd was allowed to enter.
One girl was headless, and others had their clothes burnt off. Some bodies were so badly burnt that they could be identified only through rings and jewelry. Policemen swung lanterns over the bodies in the darkness of the pier and relatives and friends would cry or faint upon identification.
Two neighbors came to the pier five times over three days to identify the body of Julia Rosen of 78 Clinton Street. The police commissioner, due to the fact that a sizable amount of money was found on the body, insisted that a relative be produced before a claim could be made. At 4:30 PM on the afternoon of the third day, fifteen-year-old Esther Rosen, Julia’s daughter, leaned over the box, touched her head and said that was her mother because she had braided her hair that very day. Esther and her two brothers had waited at home all weekend for their mother. The police asked about the money on the body and Esther said that the family came to America four years before, but the father had died and Julia always feared leaving the family’s savings at home.
As you are crossing Delancey Street, as in the movie title, notice the Williamsburg Bridge. It was erected in 1903 and displaced ten thousand tenants.
➑SEWARD PARK HIGH SCHOOL (350 Grand Street)—This 1929 high school sits on the site of the old Ludlow Street Jail (built 1859) and the Essex Street Police Court (built 1856). The jail housed Boss Tweed, the famous corrupt head of the Democratic Party Tammany Hall machine, and he died here in 1878 after being captured in an escape attempt.
The Ludlow Street Jail served as an alimony jail for husbands who deserted their families, and the police court arraigned many of the women who were jailed for picketing during garment industry strikes in the area.
The high school has many famous graduates: Zero Mostel (blacklisted in the 1950s), Jerry Stiller, Walter Matthau, Tony Curtis (then Bernie Schwartz), Moe Biller (president of the American Postal Workers Union in 1980), and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The school has a long tradition of serving those whose native language isn’t English and this tradition continues today.
➒LOWER EAST SIDE TENEMENT MUSEUM (103 Orchard Street, (212) 982-8420)—The Tenement Museum offers an excellent tour of the tenement down the block (97 Orchard Street), as well as a video on immigration and New York City history. The museum opened in 1989, in a tenement that went up for $8,000 in the early 1860s. Ten thousand people lived in it during its history until everyone was evicted in 1935 during the depression.
Somewhere on Orchard Street, the 1917 women’s food riot started over what was a new phenomenon in American history—inflation. From 1914 to 1920, the cost of living went up more than one hundred percent. Even with people working themselves to death, it seemed impossible to keep one’s head above water. Jewish women organized house-to-house boycott campaigns that spread across the Northeast.
It began in Manhattan on February 20, 1917, when famous Lower East Side activist Maria Ganz, who worked as a forewoman in a factory making $10 per week, saw a woman and an onion peddler arguing over food prices on Orchard Street. The peddler was asking for 19 cents per pound, and the woman was arguing with him; the woman, enraged, overturned his cart, and hundreds of women joined in the riot. Fruits and vegetables went flying through the air as the police were called in, only to get pelted with food. The riot spread to nearby Rivington Street, and eventually the women organized a march to City Hall. Maria Ganz was arrested for making a speech in Yiddish; the police admitted they didn’t understand it, but claimed its gist was to incite a riot.
A group of women subsequently held a rally at then-Rutgers Square, and set up a committee (The Women’s Anti-High Price League) with offices in the Jewish Daily Forward building. The League demanded the city buy $1 million worth of food and sell it at cost to the public.
Mayor Mitchell refused to carry out this invasion of the “free market,” so the women took up positions at stores and peddler’s carts all over the city, boycotting certain foods and making sure anyone who bought them had their baskets overturned upon exiting from stores. The boycotts were successful in causing food to pile up on railroad trains; the price dropped to sell off the surplus.
Food riots occurred in the Bronx and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Inflation stays with us, as does the legacy of stagnant wages.
➓HEADQUARTERS OF THE PIONEERS OF LIBERTY (56 Orchard Street below Grand Street)—The Pioneers of Liberty was the first Jewish anarchist organization in the United States, founded after the Haymarket Tragedy in Chicago. It organized unions, lectures, and demonstrations on behalf of fellow workers. Alexander Berkman joined in 1888 and member Hillel Solotaroff was the one who introduced Alexander to Emma Goldman at Sach’s Café. Emma would stay with Hillel in her early days in New York City.
⓫ALLEN STREET AND DIVISION STREET—Allen Street is the continuation, southward, of First Avenue. It was originally half as wide, expanded in the 1930s to create a Park Avenue look. It cost $8 million to create this widened street, with $7.6 million going to the real estate industry for the buildings being knocked down. All of the current buildings on the east side of Allen Street went up after the 1930s.
The Second Avenue elevated train traveled down the west side of Allen Street, until it was knocked down in 1942. It cost $133,000 to demolish, and storeowners hoped that it would improve sales and the atmosphere of the block. It didn’t.
Farther north, between Delancey and Houston streets, Allen Street was also famous for prostitution. Prostitution was a big industry back in the Pale of Settlement, and it continued on the Lower East Side because of economic exploitation and discrimination. Women could earn $46 to $72 per week as prostitutes, as opposed to one-tenth to one-fifth that amount in the local garment industry.
The Jewish Daily Forward warned families to stay away from Allen, Chrystie, and Forsythe streets to avoid the “official flesh trade in the Jewish quarter.”
⓬KNICKERBOCKER VILLAGE (10 Monroe Street)—The Rosenbergs lived on the eleventh floor of this building, in an apartment that faced the courtyard, from 1942 to 1950. They were arrested at this address for allegedly selling the secret of the atom bomb in the famous cold war case.
The apartment complex, with sixteen hundred units, was built in 1934 as part of one of Robert Moses’s slum clearance projects. It was a joint project of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and the federal government. It refused to rent to African Americans through the 1950s.
Ethel Rosenberg never left the Lower East Side until after she graduated high school, growing up in a cold-water flat at 64 Sheriff Street, since knocked down for newer apartment buildings. She was a popular singer at political rallies and a union organizer in the garment district. She met Julius in December 1936, at an International Seaman’s Union benefit, when he was with the Young Communist League.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death on June 19, 1953. There have been revelations about the case in recent years with the fall of the Soviet Union, but the fact remains that making an atom bomb was not a secret at the time. Also, there is still no evidence that they sold an alleged secret to the Soviet Union, an ally of the United States at the time of the alleged spying. The recent revelations from the Soviet Union via the National Security Agency claim that Julius was a spy and Ethel was not.
At the time of the executions, there were rallies on the Rosenbergs’ behalf all over the world, including one on Seventeenth Street off of Union Square in New York City.
⓭MARX’S FIRST INTERNATIONAL (Site of fairly new hotel at Broome and Forsythe Street)—The First International, which lasted from 1864 to the mid-1870s, was an attempt to unite the workers of the world. The International Working Men’s Association was founded in London, England, with Karl Marx in attendance. It had the following two purposes: 1) To prevent the importation of strikebreakers from one country to another (immigrant labor was brought in for just this purpose in England) and 2) To end wars where workers kill one another for the benefit of rulers.
Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx got into fights over the centralization of power, and in 1872, the International was moved to this site at what was then the Tenth Ward Hotel, a popular meeting place for Irish and German radicals. Karl Marx felt America was where a worker’s organization belonged, because hundreds of thousands of workers were emigrating here every year. He also feared the anarchists would take over the International in Europe.
Section One of the International had its headquarters here under the name “The Communist Club,” and there were other sections around New York City as well (Victoria Woodhull, the free-love advocate, headed Section Twelve at 100 Prince Street). There were several more internationals; the Second International, from 1889, was the most successful. It brought together Socialist Parties from around the world until patriotic aims by individual countries destroyed it during WWI.
Seven blocks of tenements were knocked down to create Sara Delano Roosevelt Park, opened in 1935, then a state-of the-art park, with a large swimming pool, and plenty of breathing room for residents.
Beneath Rivington and Stanton streets, within the park, was an African burial ground, used after the City Hall area burial ground was full (1795–1853). In the 1970s and 1980s, it was known as New York City’s largest open-air heroin market, but it has since improved, featuring sports and free outdoor movies.
To continue a long tradition, as well as a radical walking tour tradition, end your walk with a meal at Katz’s Delicatessen at the corner of Houston and Ludlow Streets. It has been here since 1888, makes twelve thousand hot dogs a week, and recreates the old “Garden Cafeteria” atmosphere.
If you look eastward and upward from Katz’s Deli to the roof of 250 East Houston Street (Red Square Apartments) you will see an original Lenin statue from the Soviet Union. Unfortunately he is standing atop one of the early gentrifying buildings of the neighborhood. And down the block from Katz’s Deli at 171 Ludlow Street is a new monstrosity, the $67 million Hotel Indigo.