by Susan M. Anderson

Ten years ago I was commissioned to do a diptych of the Lower East Side by the American Jewish Committee. Thus began my love affair with that part of New York that is, very loosely speaking and depending on who is doing the talking, bounded on the north by 14th Street and on the west by, say, Broadway and extends just beyond the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Representatives of the Committee told me they were interested in seeing not just the Jewish landmarks of the Lower East Side, but wanted a painting that would indicate the rich cultural diversity of the district. My subject, I was told, was not just the central and eastern European migration of peoples from the early 1880s to 1925, but also the present immigrant group of peoples from the Far East — Koreans, Thais, Vietnamese, and Chinese predominantly from the Mainland. In other words they wanted a slice, vertical as well as horizontal.

So how to absorb this neighborhood and what it was and what it is and put it on canvas? — I walked and walked and walked, read and read and read, drew and drew and drew — and, I must admit, tucked in frequently at Ratner’s.

Columbus Park

Of special interest to me was the physical evidence of how a place is used and reused by different generations and peoples and how each group leaves an imprint on one spot that is not totally erased but lingers and is taken up in a unique way by future immigrant groups.

Take for instance the Chinese funeral parlor on Mulberry Street facing Columbus Park. The building is a prime example of multicultural layering with its ornately carved details crafted by immigrant Italian stone masons at the turn of the twentieth century, the original name of the funeral parlor etched above the lintel. Overarching this is a large neon sign in Chinese, presumably the current name of the funeral parlor.

One Saturday morning while watching the action in Columbus Park — women doing their Tai Chi exercises to loud boom-box music, children running, swinging, laughing, serious card players drawing a crowd, costumed sword twirlers practicing their moves —  I heard firecrackers and saw a group of local mourners in black coming out of the funeral home across the street. The widow, or so I took her to be, for she was a small Chinese woman dressed in black silk and carried a handkerchief, was flanked by two large men in sunglasses and solemn expressions. They moved slowly, silently behind two cars, a black convertible filled with flowers and an open-air hearse carrying the casket. Silent mourners. Very loud firecrackers, the latter perhaps having something to do with Chinese burial rites, I told myself.

And walking in front were four men looking and sounding like a band from a Fellini movie, playing trumpet, trombone, saxophone, and bass drum.

The band leader, I could tell, liked his pasta. He wore a black tight-fitting suit and had a captain’s hat pulled down over his forehead, the visor emphasizing his cheeks as they rhythmically inflated and deflated like fleshy balloons. He huffed and he puffed and he sweated as he blew his trumpet, and the band played Dixieland to the beat of a funereal bass drum, played it earnestly, played it badly, played it to wing a Chinese soul to heaven, played it, these Italian-American funeral music makers, as their fathers had before them and their father’s fathers, too. And the silent mourners walked behind. And the firecrackers raked the air. Oh when the saints. Boom. Go marching in. Boom.

Then the procession rounded a corner, labored up a sudden steep hill and was gone.

Ten years ago I had different reasons than I do now for exploring the Lower East Side. There was a commission and with it a reputation and even a little money pushing me to the tip of Manhattan, so I thought then that I had better get Lower East Sideness right, at least enough to translate it into oil which on an artist’s brush becomes feeling and emotion and turns objects inside out until we begin to really see them. So diptych I did, and the client was happy — always a good thing because they have to live with the painting — and I was happy for the money, but that was then and this is now.

Why did the Lower East Side return to haunt again? Who knows, maybe it has something to do with ancestral blood calling me home or death and loss being in the end at the inscrutable heart of migration — the ‘push’ in the ‘push-pull’ equation of significant movement — or maybe because a good chunk of curiosity is enchanted with penultimates, I do not know, but it is here again, this time taking the form of a story growing into a novel, maybe even a saga, a four-generational look at a family who in 1901 comes to America and settles on Elizabeth Street, one story of possible millions, set in the teeming migration of the twentieth century that still energizes our country infusing politics, music, art, cuisine, life as we know it, with its unique taste and flavor and outlook, folding new flavors in with the old with every fresh immigrant group.                                                                   

Perhaps you ask how an Anderson with roots in the Midwest can know anything at all about the Lower East Side, but Anderson is only the half of it, my ancestors will tell you. My grandmother along with her family migrated to this country in 1901 from Termini Immerese on the northwest coast of Sicily, passed through Ellis Island and went on to Chicago. However, many of her fellow townspeople settled on Elizabeth Street on the Lower East Side of New York.

Her home town, Termini Immerese, incorporates the ruins of one of the first Greek outposts on the northwest coast of Sicily, Himera. In 409 B.C. Himera, located in the then-Phoenician-controlled part of the island and having been in existence since 648 B.C. and much fought over according to the historian Diodorus – Hamilcar having lost his life in one of the significant battles for this ancient city – was destroyed by the Carthaginians.

In Greek Termini Immerese is Thermae Himeraeae, in Latin, Therame Himerenses, literally “Himera’s Hot Springs.” Legend has it that Hercules got his strength from drinking its waters. Lucky for him he did not burn his tongue drinking it, since the constant temperature of these medicinal springs is 109.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Termini is one of the locations in “Cinema Paradiso.” A nice place to take the waters and to winter, they tell me, but in 1901, it was hard to find a job there.

Which brings me to the reasons for the Great European Migration of the mid nineteenth to early twentieth centuries occurring between 1840 and 1925, many immigrants settling at first on the Lower East Side.

The ‘push’ in the ‘push-pull’ equation of migration was different for each group. For the Irish it was the potato famine of 1840: their choice was to starve or to emigrate. For most German immigrants a decade later the push was political ostracism after the Kaiser outlawed Socialism, imprisoned many suspected of Socialist leanings and later in the 1850s released these political prisoners on condition of their emigration.

These groups settled at first on the Lower East Side, the Irish remaining, especially on the east side of Manhattan throughout the 1920s and 1930s, finding jobs like the Italians did, first as unskilled laborers in construction; or they became policemen or firemen or conductors, many of their sons or daughters becoming lawyers or politicians.

Up until the 1880s, The Lower East Side was called Kleindeutchland, “Little Germany,” since there were more German speaking peoples there than in most cities in Germany; the Germans however moving out of the Lower East Side shortly after June 15, 1904 when the General Slocum, an excursion boat moving up the East River sank, killing over thirteen hundred passengers and crew, most of them German immigrants, almost all women and children; the fathers coming home from work that Wednesday evening to find their family had perished. Shortly afterwards, they moved en masse out of the Lower East Side, up to the east 80s and 90s of Yorkville or to Queens or west to New Jersey or to the wheat fields of Iowa, Nebraska, North or South Dakota.

Southern Italians and Sicilians came to America to find work, as did the Irish earlier in the nineteenth century, but similar to the voting pattern of Democratic Chicagoans who vote early and vote often or so say Chicago Republicans, the Italian immigrant male came to this country, worked for a while, saved his money, and returned, repeating the pattern several and in some cases many times; steamship travel by the late nineteenth century being relatively easy, quick, and inexpensive compared to transatlantic travel in the 1840s and 50s when the bulk of Irish and German migration to North America occurred. (See Sidebar)

Although immigrants were asked upon entry if this were their first time coming to the States, some historians think that this pattern of multiple entry created a numerical overstatement of twentieth-century Italian influx to America by as much as fifty percent.

By far the greatest number of immigrants living and working in the Lower East Side at the start of the twentieth century were Eastern European Jews who fled because of persecution.

Between 1791 and 1917 Russia’s Jews were restricted to live in the Pale of Settlement, a western region of Imperial Russia the borders of which kept changing but included much of Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, and Ukraine; where pogroms occurred regularly and with increasing frequency, culminating in the organized massacre in 1881 of thousands of men, women, and children when it was rumored that Jews were somehow responsible for the assassination of Czar Alexander II; and resulting in the migration, between 1881 and 1910, of over two million Eastern European Jews, one of the largest migrations of a single peoples in recorded history, mostly to North America where work especially in the garment industry was readily available.

And this brings me to the ‘pull’ in the ‘push-pull’ equation of migration. The Lower East Side was attractive to many immigrants because work, food, and lodging were easily obtainable.

It was relatively easy to find work on the Lower East Side in the early 1900s for the unskilled as well as the skilled worker. New York City began building the subway system with the IRT line starting at what is now the City Hall stop, at the southern end of the Lower East Side so there was an almost unquenchable need for unskilled labor to dig tunnels, haul rock, and lay track.

And there were the needle trades. At that time the garment center was

not on Seventh Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street like it is now, or more properly speaking was, up until its recent global dispersal, but downtown, due to the presence in the Lower East Side of the major department stores and wholesale houses on Grand and Canal Streets.

It was an industry that got its start in New York in the 1820s when Southerners began relying on New York immigrant tailors from Poland and dressmakers from Italy to manufacture cheap clothing for their slaves. This started the ready-to-wear industry and it grew considerably during the Civil War when New York supplied both North and South with uniforms, firmly establishing the city at the heart of clothing design and manufacture.

Because of the seasonal nature of garment manufacturing, the system relied on contractors who would be given an order for ready-made clothing or piece work.

These contractors or jobbers would supply workplace and workers, sometimes purchasing the equipment and buying the cloth or unfinished goods for the order. Contractors would also find a place in which to do the work. Many a tenement apartment was a workplace by day and by night, a home to one or two or three families. For very large orders, contractors would rent a factory, fill it with long cutting tables, rent equipment, set up work; workers began calling these factories “sweating factories” since they were made of brick and cement blocks, had high ceilings, were damp and cold in winter, hot and airless in the summer. Today we call them sweatshops, and you can still find them on the Lower East Side and in the Dumbo area of Brooklyn where I understand some of the piecework for women’s garments is still made, since it demands a fast turnaround.

In 1901 anyone with the necessary skills interested in working as a piece worker or seamstress, presser or finisher could find a job. In season, since the clothing industry provided seasonal work, all he needed to do was stand on the corner of Hester and Ludlow Streets, the ‘pig market’ as it came to be known, where contractors would hire in the morning for the day or for the job. Early in the twentieth century there was a branch of Hadassah in Paris that bought sewing machines and gave them to Jewish émigrés as they disembarked: a worker with his own sewing machine was a more attractive hire.

Women and children could contribute a few dollars each month to the primary wage earner’s income by taking work home. However, the system of paying for each piece instead of by the hour fell outside the scope of existing labor laws, such as they were, and thus was attractive to contractors and owners who paid less for more. On the other hand, women could work in the home.

And so mothers taught their children how to finish suspenders or sew collars onto men’s coats, finish buttonholes, sew beads and tassels onto women’s dresses, make artificial flowers to adorn women’s hats. The family would sit together, usually at the kitchen table and work all day; when there was piece work, children would be kept home from school and truancy rates were high.

Children as young as a three worked at the family trade, and with careful coaching could focus and work on a task for up to an hour and a half; by the time the child was ten or twelve, she was able to work a twelve-hour day.

Fortunately there were also a growing number of the socially concerned in New York, and in general an awakening social consciousness around the country forcing a local or state governmental response. It was needed.

In 1900 there were over 100,000 homeless children on the streets of New York, many of them abandoned by mothers who could not afford to feed them, left to roam the Lower East Side in gangs, looking for food or shelter or to rob an unsuspecting victim, especially in Five Points or The Bend or Bandit’s Roost, the worst of New York City’s slums where they joined the criminal class. (See Sidebar, “The Bend”)

There was no welfare at the time, so in addition to finding solutions for the most pressing social problems, hunger and homelessness, as well as their deeply complex causes, there was a mounting need for medical assistance and for education. In order to find work in the garment industry, immigrants had to learn how to sew or to press or to finish, if they did not already possess one or some of these skills when they came to this country. Furthermore, most immigrants needed to learn English, others how to read and write; and of course there was a growing need for primary and secondary schools in which to educate immigrant children.

There was also a need for light and air and some green space for children to play. And so Columbus Park was created when an early group of the socially concerned headed by Jacob Riis, himself an immigrant from Denmark and photographer, writer, activist was instrumental in tearing down the worst of the slum buildings in the area. Unfortunately this also created a housing shortage and added to the already overcrowded conditions.

Private groups concerned with decent housing lobbied tenaciously and helped to pass New York City’s Tenement House Act of 1901 mandating existing tenements be retrofitted to meet certain amenities, such as a flushing toilet for every two families, running water in each apartment, a window in each room, enough light in hallways to be able to read. Moreover, after 1901, multiple family dwellings could no longer be built on the standard New York City 25-foot lot size meant for single-family dwellings. Tenements built before 1879 are called “Pre-Law Tenements.”  Those built before 1901 are called “Old Law Tenements” and tenements built after 1901 are often called “New Law” buildings. (See Sidebar, The Tenement House Act)

Religious as well as private groups also funded evening schools and clinics; and there were a few who spent their lives teaching immigrants, starting trade schools and English language classes, held usually at night. A prime example of this effective social consciousness, along with some of the neighborhood synagogues and churches was the Henry Street Settlement House, still working for the community today, founded in 1893 by Lillian Wald who came to New York from Ohio and dedicated her life to helping Lower East Side immigrants with one of the first comprehensive outreach programs (see www.henrystreet.org).

Evidence too of the immigrants’ hunger for obtaining new skills and learning in general is the fact that the Seward Branch of the New York Public Library in 1905 was open more hours each day than any other New York Public Library branch, then or now or ever, from 6 a.m. to 1 a.m., seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year.

So just imagine living in a crowded apartment, if lucky, having a toilet down the hall, if not, having to use an outside toilet; washing your face in cold water, brushing your hair, maybe there was a mirror so you could see yourself; grabbing a piece of bread or perhaps sitting down to a breakfast of oatmeal and coffee boiled on the stove; then walking to work and working for twelve or fourteen hours in a sweating factory, hands and feet numb from cold in winter, lunch and breaks closely monitored; or clothes and hair and spirit limp from the summer heat; not knowing most of the time what was being said to you except for catching a few words here and there and understanding your friends, of course, but during the day you needed to work, not talk; and then after work and a hasty supper, going to the library or to an English class or to trade school for another four hours.

But this strange new life would be heaven. Because where you came from, if it was a good day, you were not being shot at or locked up or told to move by your government or, worse, lost a loved one or a family or a village. And if you were luckier still, then you and your family were free, but just barely, but also hungry or in debt because there was no work.

Had you or I been walking on Elizabeth, Mulberry or Mott, Orchard, Allen, Hester or Ludlow Streets in 1901, the first thing  that would strike us would probably be the crowds. On some blocks the population density was greater than the congested areas of New Delhi or Mumbai are today. Both streets and sidewalks were choked with people and with traffic, all transportation being above ground since construction on the IRT line had only just begun, closing off a major north-south thoroughfare to most vehicular and pedestrian traffic. People walking to work, searching for work; women and children shopping, done far more frequently than today since no Lower East Side apartments had ice boxes; people in groups talking to one another, laughing, singing; circus performers and clowns juggling, somersaulting; pushcarts in the streets, and sidewalk vendors, selling fish, meat, clothing, utensils, bread, flowers, vegetables, fruit, rags, old pieces of tin; horse cars carrying people or produce; horse-drawn ambulances; police with keystone-cop hats and billy clubs walking in front of vehicles to move traffic along, milk trucks, ice trucks; organ grinders with monkeys; children playing stick ball in the streets or sitting on a curb talking or playing marbles or maybe sitting on a dead horse that dropped from exhaustion or old age and lay right where it fell before eventually the city picked up the carcass.

As I walked the streets of the Lower East Side, I imaged the scene in 1901 and what a newcomer must have felt, not speaking the language, conscious of looking different, of not wearing the right clothes, afraid of not finding work, but at the same time excited by so much abundance and energy, by so much that was strange and new. Homesick, intimidated, frightened, and exhilarated.

One day as I was walking on Mulberry Street picturing the scene, the people, their outfits, the stores, the pushcarts, the traffic, the noise, hearing scraps of all the different languages I would be hearing if the year were 1901, a little girl emerged from the crowd and tugged at my sweater. I turned and bent to face her and noticed she wore a faded green and white checkered dress carefully mended in spots with threads that almost matched her outfit, coarse white tights, a white smock pulled over her dress, hand-me-downs but freshly ironed; and a somewhat frayed, maroon hand-knit sweater about three sizes too big. She was a little sweaty and dirty and smudgy in spots, the way children get after playing outside for a while. And she had on a strange pair of ankle boots; an anomaly in this neighborhood and at this time in the world’s turning, they were beautifully made and of very fine highly polished cordovan leather. Someone in her family, I thought, must be a shoemaker. Reddish blond curls ringed her head and for an instant the light rimmed her hair and those blond curls. She pointed to an old woman selling fruit from a pushcart, her small, pointing forefinger suspended in air, caught, too, in that rimming light, and whispered, “Don’t buy from her” in broken English. She smiled shyly and looked at the ground, shrugged her shoulders, frowned, then blinked two or three times as if thinking; and turning her face up to mine, grinned and winked. And vanished. She was about ten years old, I reckoned.

It was one of my characters, Tessa, the youngest of the Pandolfina family introducing herself to me; and that is how my novel began growing, by writing to work out the details of her existence, her story, her family’s story, where they came from, what it was like to live there and then to leave; why and how they decided to come to America, where they settled, what they ate, what they did when they arrived, and what they felt.

Teo Pandolfina and his two oldest sons, Nunzio and Carlo sail from Palermo on Monday July 8, 1901 on board the ship the Nord America and arrive in New York July 18. They settle on Elizabeth Street between Houston and Broome to mix and move and live out the early part of their migrated lives on the Lower East Side.

Elizabeth Street was called “The Sicilian Street.” As a matter of fact, if you were from the province of Palermo and settled on the Lower East Side, you rented on Elizabeth Street between Houston and Broome; from Messina, you rented further up the block; from Sciacca, on another block of Elizabeth Street, and so on. New York City’s Department of Housing has records based on the 1900 Census of who lived in which tenement and in which apartment, when they rented and for how long, how much rent they paid, their occupation, and how many people per room lived there.

The pivotal event in the first novel is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that in half an hour on March 25, 1911 killed 146 workers, most of them young Jewish and Italian women and men employed in making women’s blouses by owners of a sweating factory located on the 9th and 10th floors of the Asch building on Waverly Place and Greene in Greenwich Village, close to where the West Fourth Street subway station is today. The building exists today, now owned by New York University.

On the Saturday afternoon when the fire broke out on the eighth floor, started it is believed by someone throwing a match into a pile of rags, the fire engines came quickly and extended their ladders only to find that they did not reach beyond the sixth floor. Many young victims jumped  from the ninth and tenth floors to avoid the heat and flames. They fell to their death from broken windows, their bodies catapulting through air and breaking the nets held to catch them. Others were trapped behind doors locked by owners. A few climbed to safety through a trap door in the roof, opened by a floor manager; then helped to cross to another roof by a group of law students in the adjacent building. Others escaped because of their proximity to a floor supervisor who had keys to one of the hallway doors. They ran down nine or ten flights of twisting, dark smoke-filled stairwells and sustained only minor cuts, permanent lung damage, and were left with God only knows what nightmares to haunt them.

My character, Tessa worked in the factory. She was born on April 12, 1893,

and was almost eighteen years old on the day of the fire.

(To link to excerpts from my novel, click here )

The owners were later acquitted of any responsibility for the fire or for the death of their workers, despite the building’s several fire code violations, to say nothing of their locking exits; and this at a time when fire codes in New York City were primitive. For example the building lacked fire escapes on the top floors, and those that existed were too flimsy to withstand the cumulative weight of hundreds of people trying to escape the fire. In addition, floor exit and entry doors were incorrectly hung, opening into instead of out of rooms.

However the event became a defining moment in New York City’s union movement, galvanizing garment workers who up to this time had not bothered to attend meetings except for a few early activists. Now the members marched, spoke, and became a vocal block demanding much stricter child labor laws and compensation for overtime. As a direct result of this fire, New York’s labor laws are among the strictest in the nation.

Bibliography

Benjamin, Sandra, Sicily: Three Thousand Years Of Human History, 498 pp., Steerforth Press (Hanover, NH, 2006)

Buber, Martin, I and Thou, Charles Scribner’s Sons (New York, 1958)

Fazzioli, Edoardo, Chinese Calligraphy, Abbeville Press (New York, 1987)

Gabaccia, Donna R., From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880-1930 (Albany, NY, 1984)

Hopkinson, Deborah, Shutting Out The Sky: Life In The Tenements Of New York 1880 – 1924, Orchard Books (New York, 2003)

Limmer, Ruth, Six Heritage Tours of the Lower East Side, New York University Press in conjunction with The Tenement Museum of New York (New York, 1997)

Marks, Clara Goldberg, The Handbook of Hebrew Calligraphy, Jason Aronson Inc. (Northvale, New Jersey, 1990)

Metzker, Isaac, ed., A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward, Doubleday (Garden City, NY, 1971)

Plotch, Batia, ed., New York Walks: The 92nd Street Y, Henry Hold and Company (New York, 1992)

Riis, Jacob A., How The Other Half Lives, Dover Publications, Inc. (New York, 1971)

Sanders, Ronald, Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Nation, Dover Publications (New York, 1969)

Sanders, Ronald, The Lower East Side, Dover Publications (New York, 1994)

Tenement Museum Encyclopedia, http://www.tenement.org/encyclopedia.pdf

The Tenement Museum has a wonderful website at http://www.tenement.org/ and their visitors center bookstore specializes in Lower East Side subjects.

The School Of International Labor Relations at Cornell University provides resources relating to the events that led to the Triangle Factory Fire.  Its website is: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire

Yochelson, Bonnie, Berenice Abbott: Changing New York, Museum of the City of New York (New York, 1997)

Links

To meet some more characters in the novel, click here.

To read some of my nonfiction, click here.

To learn more about me click on Susan’s World.

To read more about The Lower East Side, click here.

To read iGaga’s MacBlog click here.