Race
and Ethnicity on the Lower East Side in the 1950s
Economic changes and
urban renewal policies created poverty districts
within the city. Within these districts, pocket of
older residents and other newcomers resided. Middle-class,
mostly Jewish former-tenement dwellers lived in a
handful of newly built self-contained middle-income
housing developments scattered about the area (Corlears
Hook, for example, near the Williamsburg Bridge). The
International Ladies Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU)
housing was erected in 1956. In 1958, Seward Park
Houses, another middle-class cooperative, was built
on East Broadway.
Middle-class Jews
comprised more than 75% of the residents of the union-sponsored
middle-class housing (ILGWU and Amalgamated Houses)
and a considerable percentage of the Seward Park
development, thus retaining some semblance of the
area’s Jewish past. These modern middle-class
"islands" and the social makeup of their
residents stood in contrast to the surrounding
tenements.
The mostly poor Puerto
Rican population resided in the area's public housing
projects and in adjacent tenements near Avenues C and
D. White ethnics (the European immigrants and their
descendants) lived in private tenement apartments
west of Avenue C.
There was some
friction between the white ethnic old-timers and the
mostly Puerto Rican newcomers. Old Ukranians and
other Eastern Europeans had endured neighborhood
population decline and, in the process, had laid
proprietary claim to the use of parks, commercial
avenues and streets. As with previous ethnic
successions, new groups engendered new uses for the
built environment that conflicted with those of the
prior dominant groups. Incidents of muggings,
stabbings and petty theft enacted upon white ethnics,
especially the elderly, by newcomers were pervasive,
as were juvenile crime and gang-related violence.
Links (click to follow)
Click here to learn more about
the ethnic enclaves of NYC.
Images
(click
to enlarge)
Another
photo of the Amalgamated
Clothing Workers Union.
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Selling
the Lower East Side,
is available
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Site design © 2000:
Kurt
Reymers and Dan
Webb.
(University at Buffalo, Department of
Sociology)
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