by Kurt Reymers, Daniel Webb and Christopher Mele

 

Welcome to the companion web site to the
book, Selling the Lower East Side:
Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in
New York City (University of Minnesota
Press, 2000) by Christopher Mele.

This site contains text, images and
hyperlinks to information pertaining to a
century of social change on the Lower East
Side. The material is organized thematically,
chronologically and by chapter. While all are
welcome to browse, please know that the site
is a supplement to the full analysis and history
of cultural change, real estate development
and local resistance presented in the book's
chapters.

For over a century, the Lower East Side has
been home to hundreds of thousands of
working-class and poor immigrants from
across the world as well as to painters, poets,
writers, musicians and other artists. To
outsiders, the Lower East Side remained
stubbornly peculiar -- the last holdout of
difference surrounded by an increasingly
homogeneous, middle-class Manhattan. The
persistent idea of the Lower East Side-- as
unique, culturally diverse, exhilarating and
frightening -- has always dominated the many
struggles over its future. For each generation
of residents and observers since the era of
massive European immigration
(1880-1920s), a pair of questions has
endured:

Would the Lower East Side succumb to the economic, political and cultural pressures to conform to Manhattan's emerging identity as the center of a corporate city?

 

Or, would the district known for tenements, poverty, radical protest and artistic expression continue to reinvent itself as such in defiance of the continuous desires of the city and real estate industry to "upgrade"?

 

Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real
Estate, and Resistance in New York City
addresses these two questions while
providing a story of social change over the
past one hundred years. In the pages of this
companion web site, readers may access
photographs, videos, architectural plans and
maps that further illustrate the issues and
themes covered in the book. For those
interested in learning more about the subjects
covered in the book, we have assembled
links to other web sites.

 

____________________________________ The book upon which this web site is based, Selling the Lower East Side, is available directly through or order through Site design © 2000: Kurt Reymers and Dan Webb. (University at Buffalo, Department of Sociology)