My Archive Spring 2019

Bushwick Avenue, north from Montrose Avenue. October 25, 1934. At right, outside of the Coffee Pot cafe, is the entrance to the BMT Canarsie Line (today’s L).

Meserole Street and Bushwick Avenue, 1934. Both buildings in the background, located on the north and south west corners of Bushwick Avenue and Meserole Street, bear the street names of the intersection in decorative corner-blocks. On the signs, Bushwick Avenue is referred to as "Boulevard," likely a colloquial name for this portion of the street when these buildings were erected in the late 19th century.

In the early 1900s, about 70% of children who attended public schools on the Lower East Side were immigrants or children of immigrants. These students had needs that were different from those of students who attended New York City schools in, say, the mid-1800s. They were coming from homes where English was not the primary language and from families with their own cultures and traditions. So Lower East Side schools became a kind of laboratory for ideas about how to welcome immigrant children into American life. Schools taught the so-called three Rs – reading, writing, and arithmetic – but also what some educators believed were lessons in “Americanization.” Part of the curriculum? The pledge of allegiance, how to celebrate patriotic holidays, and even Christian hymns. It was a curriculum influenced by then-common views of the benefits of assimilation. But schools were more than a place for immigrant kids to learn about America. They also became a laboratory of ideas about how immigrant kids could one day make it in America. And that meant a whole slew of classes that would have been unfamiliar to students only a generation earlier.