Neighborhood Playhouse ARCHITECT: Ingalls & Hoffman DATE: 1913-15 STYLE: Neo-Georgian The Neighborhood Playhouse was constructed in 1913-15 by sisters Alice and Irene Lewisohn as part of the Henry Street Settlement. A theatrical group by the same name founded by Lewisohn sisters was located here from 1915 to 1927. One of the city’s early “little theaters,” it was an experimental theater that presented innovative drama, song, and dance. The redbrick neo-Georgian style facade was designed by the architectural firm of Ingalls & Hoffman.

This building is one of the four surviving fieldstone religious structures built in the late Federal era in lower Manhattan. The fieldstone was quarried from Mount Pitt, a hill that once stood at the present corner of Pitt and Grand Streets. Bialystoker Synagogue, originally the Willett Street Methodist Episcopal Church, has a richly hued interior with statuary and paintings. A concealed corridor discovered during renovations in the 1990’s led to speculation that the building was a safe house on the Underground Railroad. The building is a New York City Individual Landmarks and is listed on the State and Nation Register of Historic Places.

Where do you usually work? We asked this question to our Urban Archive community and mapped their answers. Take a look!

Rivington Street, north side, west from Ludlow Street, showing a station of the Second Ave. Elevated Line on Allen Street.

Anshe Chesed and Rodeph Sholom are respectively the oldest and second oldest surviving synagogue buildings in the city, and some of the oldest in the country. Both were constructed for German Jewish congregations in German architectural styles: Gothic Revival and Rundbogenstil (“round-arch style”), and feature red brick, central staircases and symmetrical façades with recessed central sections and square towers. Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue is the only Greek Synagogue in New York and the only synagogue of Romaniote Jews in the Western Hemisphere. The Eldridge Street Synagogue was America’s first major house of worship built by Eastern European Orthodox Jews. The yellow brick building features Moorish and Romanesque details and rich ornament. At its peak in the early 20th century, the synagogue hosted as many as 1,000 worshippers at services, but was forced to close in the mid-20th century when the area’s Jewish population began to dwindle. In 1986, the Eldridge Street Project funded a large-scale restoration of the building, which was repurposed as a museum. The Former Congregation Anshe Chesed, Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and the Former Eldridge Street Synagogue are all designated New York City Individual Landmarks.

The history of organized outdoor play for children in New York goes back over 100 years, reflecting the social and cultural issues throughout.

Broome Street, northside, east from Willett Street. Public School No. 34 is the third building from the left, June 6, 1930.

Since its founding in 1973 by a group of Puerto Rican artists, poets and intellectuals, the Nuyorican Poets Café has become a cultural icon in New York City. “Nuyorican,” a word that blends “New York” and “Puerto Rican,” refers to the movement begun by Puerto Rican artists to battle social injustice and find empowerment through intellectual and cultural expression. The Café became a venue for displaying and digesting such creative expression, especially poetry and spoken word, but also theater, music, visual arts and film. Originally located in the living room of poet Miguel Algarin’s East Village apartment, the founders purchased this former tenement building in 1980. The Café, a highly respected nonprofit arts organization, continues to host an array of award-winning performances, educational programs and exhibits, and to provide support for fledgling artists and serves as an important cultural touchstone for the city.

The Bialystoker Synagogue, 1930.

Our Lady of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church, 213 Stanton Street, ca. 1973. The Church of Our Lady of Sorrows is located in an area once known as Kleindeutschland, Little Germany. Established in 1867, it ministered to the large number of German Catholics who migrated to New York in the late 19th century. The church, designed by Henry Engelbert, was built with a combination of Victorian, Byzantine, and Romanesque architectural styles and completed in 1868.  By the early 1910s, much of the German population on the Lower East Side had moved uptown. In their place were multitudes of newly-arrived Italian immigrants, and then later, Hispanic. Despite these shifts in neighborhood demographic, the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows had adapted to its surroundings to serve the changing congregations. By 2000, masses were offered in Spanish and English; the church today is also known as Nuestra Señora de los Dolores.

Streit’s Matzos factory at the corner of Suffolk and Rivington Streets. The Streit family produced matzo at this location from 1925 to June 2015.

Brick tenement with pitched roof and single dormer at No. 372 Grand Street, ca. 1902. The corner building, which may have dated to the 1850s was then listed as No. 374 Grand. The ground floor storefront provided a variety of wares, including stoves, radiators, and cookware.

2020 sure has been a whirlwind! Here are some interesting facts, stories, and images from throughout the five boroughs that we dug up along the way.

Adolf Mandel Bank, Rivington Street. February 16, 1912. Local pick-pockets started a rumor that the bank’s safe was insecure, in order to spark a run on the bank, and then to rob concerned customers who had made withdrawals. Nearly a thousand people waited on Rivington Street to access their deposits.

Loew's Delancey Theater, 140-146 Delancey Street. In 1911, tenement buildings with Jewish storefronts were demolished to make way for the Loew’s Theater, which opened in 1912 and remained in operation until 1977.

The Amalgamated Dwellings, one of the oldest housing cooperatives in the United States, was the second cooperative sponsored by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, after the successful Amalgamated Cooperative Apartments in the Bronx. The six-story Art Deco building with 236 apartments was designed by the architects Springsteen & Goldhammer and was completed in 1930 at the site of a former printing plant. The building covered one city block, with a protected garden in the center.

The southeast corner of Suffolk and Rivington Streets, 1910. Rivington Street is named after James Rivington. A "supposed" Loyalist who wrote a Loyalist newspaper, the New York Gazetteer, later The Royal Gazette, Rivington was covertly part of the Culper Spy Ring, which supplied George Washington with information.

Ratner’s was a famous Jewish kosher dairy restaurant, founded in 1905 by Jacob Harmatz and his brother-in-law Alex Ratner. The pair supposedly flipped a coin to decide whose name would be on the sign. Originally located on Pitt Street, Ratner’s moved to 138 Delancey Street in 1918. Until 1975, Ratner’s was a 24-hour establishment and therefore part of the late-night city scene popular with Jewish performers, actors, musicians, and gangsters. Ratner’s remained in the Harmatz family until its closure in 2002.

In the first half of the 20th century, Jewish boxers were some of the most famous and feared athletes in the country.

The Centre Street Loop got its start in 1908 with the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company's first Manhattan subway track: the terminal at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge. The Loop was the first of two BMT Brooklyn Loops designed to connect various Brooklyn Subway lines without requiring new and inefficient terminals in lower Manhattan. Under its original design, the Loop would connect the tracks of Broadway Elevated coming over the Williamsburg (now the BMT Jamaica Line) with Brooklyn Bridge trains originating in Brooklyn. The loop was never completed as planned and was instead incorporated into the BMT Nassau Street Line. These photos document the construction of the tracks that today carry the J and Z trains, and capture glimpses of Manhattan's Civic Center before the completion of the Municipal Building and other prominent structures around Foley Square and City Hall Park.

Hamilton Fish Library, date unknown. Designed by Carrère & Hastings and opened in 1909, the library was named for American statesman, Hamilton Fish, who was governor of New York and Secretary of State under Ulysses S. Grant. The building included a large open air roof area used for library functions.The building was razed during the widening of Houston Street in the 1950s. A public housing project now stands at its original site. A new Hamilton Fish Park Branch opened at 415 East Houston Street in 1960.

Harry De Jur Playhouse, 466 Grand Street, ca. 1979. This three-story Georgian Revival red brick structure, constructed between 1912 and 1915, was built as a theatre space for the Henry Street Settlement. Designed by architects Harry C. Ingalls and F. Burrall Hoffman, Jr., it was named for Harry De Jur, who had attended the settlement's programs as a child and was on the board as an adult. Initially created to provide the dense immigrant community of the Lower East Side with a local playhouse, the experimental theatre (along with Providence Playhouse and Washington Square Players) became an important venue in the foundation of modern American dramatic theater.

Hamilton Fish Park, ca. 1982. Completed in 1900, this small park was named for Hamilton Fish, a Governor of New York, a United States Senator, and United States Secretary of State. The original park was formal in style with a Beaux-Arts Gymnasium, sculpted water fountains, symmetrical plant beds, and trees. After only three years, the park was renovated to include active recreation such as track and tennis. In 1936 the park was further altered by the addition of a WPA pool (one of 11 pools opened that summer). Today the park included the pool, a community center in the old gymnasium (with meeting rooms for neighborhood groups), basketball courts, handball courts, and children's playgrounds.

135 Essex Street, ca. 1978. Schmulka Bernstein’s, also known as Bernstein-on-Essex, was a kosher deli and Chinese restaurant that flourished in this spot for over three decades. Armed with the slogan, “where kashrut is king and quality reigns,” the eatery originally opened as a kosher delicatessen in 1957. Founded by Solomon Bernstein, the restaurant was a family-run operation that began introducing Cantonese-style dishes to the menu in 1959. Cooking with veal, beef, and chicken livers instead of pork, the Bernsteins infused the cuisine of two cultures in a way that had never been done before. As boasted on the restaurant’s menu, Schmulka Bernstein was the “originator” of kosher Chinese foods in New York City. The menu featured dishes like Lo Mein Bernstein, cooked with chicken livers, alongside Eastern European delicacies. Waiters also wore traditional tasseled Chinese caps instead of yarmulkes. In the early 1990s, the owners sold the family business. While it remained in operation for a number of years, like many other beloved Jewish delicatessens on the Lower East Side, Schmulka Bernstein’s eventually closed down. The original building has since been demolished and replaced with a luxury condominium development.

"22 to 4 (left to right) Columbia Street, east side, south from Broome (left), to but not including Grand (right) Streets, June 6, 1930." Meyer Lansky lived with his parents in an apartment in No. 6 (second building from right) in the early 1920s. It was while they lived here that the teenaged Lansky became acquainted with his (also infamous) friends Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel (who lived at 36 Columbia Street) and Charlie “Lucky” Luciano ( who lived at 265 East 10th Street).

Nos. 90-94 Sheriff Street, unknown date. By the mid-1960s, the tenement buildings pictured had been razed for the development of the Masaryk Towers, six middle-income housing cooperatives built under the auspices of New York's Mitchell-Lama Housing Program. The towers — named for Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia — opened in 1967. In recent years, the Masaryk board of directors has come under fire for restricting access to a de-mapped stretch of Rivington Street running through the development.

Rivington Street, north side, at Columbia Street. The view shows the De Witt Memorial Church at No. 280 Rivington Street, between Columbia and Cannon Streets. These buildings were reported to be over congested with 1 building having 98 people in 62 rooms!

Church of St. Mary, 440 Grand Street, ca. 1978. Established in 1826 to serve Irish immigrants living in the Lower East Side, the Church of St. Mary is the third oldest Catholic parish in New York City. The building, erected in 1832-33, was later expanded in 1871 by the renowned ecclesiastical architect Patrick Charles Keely. Before the sanctuary was completed, the parish held services in a former Presbyterian church on Sheriff Street. The original section of the building is the second oldest Roman Catholic structure to exist in the city, after St. Patrick's Old Cathedral, which was built in 1815.

My Archive Spring 2019 "My friend Ellen Retter is standing in front of Streit's grocery store on Rivington Street. I took this photo of her on December 19, 2013. Ellen was my dearest friend. I had been visiting her at her apartment on Grand Street, and we stopped to shop at Streit's before she walked me to the #21 bus stop on Houston Street. Ellen passed away suddenly on October 31, 2018. This is the only photo that I have of her, and I cherish it." —Phyllis Klein

194 East 2nd Street The pre-law tenements on lots 40-42 (or 194-198 2nd Street) were demolished between 1933 and 1940. The demolition of two of these buildings was completed by the Work Progress Administration (WPA), which was funded by the government following the Great Depression to give job opportunities to the unemployed.

Anshe Chesed and Rodeph Sholom are respectively the oldest and second oldest surviving synagogue buildings in the city, and some of the oldest in the country. Both were constructed for German Jewish congregations in German architectural styles: Gothic Revival and Rundbogenstil (“round-arch style”), and feature red brick, central staircases and symmetrical façades with recessed central sections and square towers. Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue is the only Greek Synagogue in New York and the only synagogue of Romaniote Jews in the Western Hemisphere. The Eldridge Street Synagogue was America’s first major house of worship built by Eastern European Orthodox Jews. The yellow brick building features Moorish and Romanesque details and rich ornament. At its peak in the early 20th century, the synagogue hosted as many as 1,000 worshippers at services, but was forced to close in the mid-20th century when the area’s Jewish population began to dwindle. In 1986, the Eldridge Street Project funded a large-scale restoration of the building, which was repurposed as a museum. The Former Congregation Anshe Chesed, Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue and the Former Eldridge Street Synagogue are all designated New York City Individual Landmarks.

“Congregation Beth Hamedrash Hagadol.” The Gothic Revival Norfolk Street Baptist Church, built 1850, was purchased in 1885 by the Orthodox Jewish Congregation Beth Hamedrash Hagodol. After over 120 years of continuous use, the synagogue closed in 2007, due to a dwindling congregation and deterioration of the structure. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999, but today remains abandoned.

100-110 Delancey Street, ca. 1978.

135 Ridge Street, at the southwest corner of Stanton Street. J. Leskowitz, a clothier and tailor, had his shop on the ground floor, while surgeon and dentist Dr. S. Jaeger had his practice on the second floor.

A Gothic Revival synagogue at 172 Norfolk Street. Built in 1849 for Congregation Ansche Chesed, it was sold to Congregation Shaari Rachmim in 1873, to The First Hungarian Congregation Ohab Zedek in 1886, and to congregation Sheveth Achim Anshe Slonim in 1921, before its abandonment in 1974 and subsequent vandalization. In 1986, Jewish Spanish sculptor and painter Angel Orensanz purchased the property, restoring it and converting it to an art gallery and performance space. It was designated a New York City landmark in 1987.

304 Houston Street, 1935.

New York City’s oldest extant building originally built as a synagogue is this Gothic Revival structure designed by architect Alexander Saeltzer. The synagogue was built in 1849 by Reformed Jewish Congregation Ansche Chesed (People of Kindness) which was made up primarily of German Jews, as well as Dutch Jews and Polish Jews. (This group generally emigrated to New York City a few decades earlier than the wave of Eastern European Jews who later populated the Lower East Side so densely.) It was the largest synagogue in the United States at the time and could hold up to 1,500 worshipers. Services were conducted primarily in German. Services were accompanied by musical instruments, including an organ that was added in 1869 at the same time as family pews were introduced, with men and women sitting together - evidence that the congregation was modernizing and Americanizing. In 1873, the congregation merged with another and the building was sold to Orthodox Congregation Shaari Rachmim. Shari Rachmim removed the organ and remained in the building until 1886. Then, First Hungarian Congregation Ohab Zedek occupied the building until 1921 and Congregation Anshe Slonim worshipped there from 1921 to 1974. Like so many others, the 1970s brought abandonment and decay to the historic building until it was rescued by artist Angel Orensanz in 1986. It was designated a historic landmark in 1987 and is now used as a well-known and beloved event space.

“East Houston St., Moving Picture Theatres.” The Academy Theater, with signs advertising “high class Broadway features.” In this photo, the theater appears abandoned; the sign to the left of its facade addresses anyone seeking “information regarding these 3 buildings,” presumably the theater and its neighbors. According to an apocryphal story, in 1921, an Academy porter confused a beam of light from a skylight opened to cool the auditorium for a flame and, allegedly, shouted “fire” in the crowded theater.

Bundled to keep warm, this woman stands with a pile of Forward and other newspapers to sell on the Lower East Side. Selling newspapers was not just a job for the “newsies,” street-smart, impoverished child laborers who hawked them on the streets. It was a rough-and- tumble game, with vendors zealously guarding their territory. East Broadway was hub for Yiddish papers, though they were widely sold throughout the City.

Entrance to 294 East Broadway, March 30, 1937.

Congregation Chasam Sopher is an Orthodox synagogue located at 10 Clinton Street on the Lower East Side. Formed in 1892 by the joining of two congregations of immigrants from Poland, it occupies a Romanesque Revival building constructed in 1853. It is among the oldest surving synagogue buildings in the United States, the second-oldest synagogue building in New York City, and the oldest still in use in the state.

East side of Norfolk Street, viewed from Essex Street, late 1960s. Beth Hamedrash Hagodol, at center left, was still holding services, though its attendance had begun to diminish. The synagogue was the only building on this block of Norfolk Street not razed for Seward Park Urban Renewal.

Stores on Rivington Street, 1978. Next door to the Porky Meat Mart, Catholic religious icons are visible inside 129 Rivington, while the storefront window captures a reflection of Schapiro’s Kosher Wines, across the street. The businesses along Rivington Street reflect the diversity of communities who made the Lower East Side their home: By the 1970s, the neighborhood was home to a growing population of Latin American immigrants, in addition to second and third generation Jewish Americans.

Essex Street Marke, December 8, 1941. The Essex Street Market began in 1940 as part of an effort by Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia to find a new place for street merchants to do business. At that time, pushcarts and vendors crowded city streets, particularly in the Lower East Side, making it hard for police and fire vehicles to easily pass. Flustered by congestion and unregulated activity, Mayor LaGuardia saw it fit to better organize the streets. He outlawed the practice, calling pushcart peddlers "a blemish on the face of the city," and financed the opening of the Essex Street Market. In a wider-effort to minimize overcrowding and improve public health and hygiene, he also developed various other indoor retail stores throughout Manhattan. The Essex Street Market closed in its original location on May 5, 2019. It will move into a new and larger home at the Essex Crossing development later in 2019.

Upon reaching New York, many Jewish immigrants settled on the Lower East Side, establishing new congregations and social aid societies specific to local communities of the old country. Small synagogues were so common that a stretch of East Broadway was known as “shtiebel row,” after the Yiddish term for a small space for prayer (in contrast to larger synagogues). Over time, Manhattan’s Jewish population shifted to other parts of the city, causing Lower East Side congregations to dwindle. Many synagogues were sold, shuttered, or abandoned, and some have since been demolished. Still, the neighborhood bears many traces of its once-vibrant Jewish life.

The building shown is the Loew's Delancey Theater, a motion-picture house. September 25, 1936 showings include “My American Wife,” a comedy starring Francis Lederer and Ann Sothern, and “Yours for the Asking,” with George Raft and Dolores Costello.

Hamilton Fish Pool, 1936. Designed in 1898 by Carrère & Hastings (of later NYPL building fame) the Hamilton Fish Park Gymnasium opened in 1900. The building, a grand Beaux Arts structure, was constructed as the first phase of the park's construction, and had only a small fountain and grassy area with benches surrounding it. In 1903 more recreational venues were constructed including tennis courts and a running track. In June of 1936 the WPA pool opened adjacent to the elaborate gymnasium. In 1952 the U.S. Olympic Team used the pool for practice sessions before the Helsinki Olympics. Hamilton Fish Park (named for a 19th century New York politician) underwent a $14 million restoration in the early 1990s, including upkeep on the pool. The gymnasium was granted landmark status in 1982 and is today used as a community center.

Run on Adolf Mandel's Bank, February 16, 1912.

176 East 3rd Street, 1937.

Founded by Sam Schapiro in 1899, Schapiro’s Kosher Wines operated on Rivington Street until 2000. From 1899 to 1967 the grapes were pressed on-location in the block-long network of cellars below the street.

Norfolk Street Baptist Church ARCHITECT: Unknown DATE: 1850 STYLE: Gothic Revival Striking in profile, this smooth-faced stone Synagogue is an interesting example of modified Gothic Revival architecture. Raised on a platform of steps above the street, the recessed center section of the symmetrical facade is flanked by square towers pierced by coupled pointed arched windows that light the side vestibules. The dominant feature of this structure is the main, double entrance door with over-door panel joining it to the tall tripartite arched window, surmounted by a pedimented roof, affixed with the Star of David.

155 Rivington Street ca. 1915

Northeast corner of Norfolk and Grand Streets, October 12, 1931. The corner building, No. 372 Grand Street, and the adjoining three-story structures at Nos. 50 and 50½ Norfolk Street are flanked by the two grand entrances to the Manufacturers Trust Co. bank (formerly State Street bank).

75 Essex Street, 1928. Designed by the architects Rose & Stone, this Italianate-style building is the only one of its kind on the Lower East Side. When construction completed in 1890, the Eastern Dispensary relocated to the building from its previous headquarters on Grand Street. The dispensary was established in 1832 to provide the city's most vulnerable with medical care, during a massive cholera epidemic. Financed through private donations but with operations funded by the city, the facility offered more than just healthcare. It functioned as one of the city's "milk laboratories," providing sanitary milk for infants. Later renamed Good Samaritan Dispensary, the operation served the Lower East Side for over 60 years. When the dispensary closed in 1955, due to unpaid taxes, the Bell Yarn Shop moved in for a brief period in the 1960s. By 1985, the Eisner Brothers from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, purchased the building, opening a sportswear store on the ground floor. The future of this historic building has been the subject of debate since 2014, when the Landmarks Preservation Commission rejected a request for Landmark designation. The property, celebrated as a "testimony to social reformers in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries," has been pulled on and off the market since the LPC ruling. If the building is sold, it is the Eisners' stated priority to make sure that it is "left as is on the outside."

Readers of the Forward looked to the paper for important news. Here, a large group gathers at the corner of Essex and Delancey Streets to read the Forward’s reporting that the Second World War had ended.

546-556 Grand Street, 1932. No. 550 is the three-story, wood-frame building with a brick front at center. Between 1914 and 1920, the (later) infamous mobster Meyer Lansky lived with his parents in two different apartments on this block. In 1914 they moved into a third floor apartment at 546 Grand Street (at left) and in 1917 they moved a few doors down into an apartment at no. 552 (just to the right of the short building).

Israel Orphan Asylum Though now an 11-story apartment building built in 1997, occupies this lot, the lot is so large because, according to historic maps, a Methodist church once stood on the site. This church can be dated back to 1853. As of 1914, the church had been demolished and turned into the Israel Orphan Asylum owned by the Austrian Hebrew Free Burial and Orphan Asylum Association, which was a three-story brick tenement building. A historic New York Times article from 1918 says that this was the largest Jewish orphanage on the East Side. A man named Gustave Hartman, a judge and Jewish community leader, founded this orphanage. Originally it was for male children ages one to six, but later opened to girls and children up to age fourteen. Many of these children were wartime orphans. Hartman financed the orphanage on his own and through fundraising. He died in 1936. 12,000 people attended his funeral and 85 police officers were needed to control the crowds. His wife continued to run the orphanage after his death. The small triangular plot of land located at 2nd Street and Avenue C was named the Gustave Hartman Triangle and still keeps that name today. Jewish orphanages were a prominent fixture in New York during this time.

As the center of New York’s Jewish immigrant communities, the Lower East Side was home to numerous Jewish-owned businesses, none more prominent than its many Kosher eateries, delicatessens, and grocers. Check out the handful of famous establishments that still serve food the old-fashioned way.

Apartment building at 193-197 Stanton Street. Storefronts include a “pocket billiards” parlor, plumbing supply shop, and “J Leskowitz, Mfr. of Mohair, Alpaca & Tropical Suits.”

“Delancey St. - Williamsburg Bridge. \[Delancey Street Looking East from Near Ludlow St.]” Dated 1905, this photo shows the Delancey Street approach to the Williamsburg Bridge under construction. The carriageway, streetcar tracks, and the Brooklyn Rapid Transit subway tracks (also under construction) are visible at the foot of the bridge, though the span itself is barely visible through the East River haze.

Congregation Morgan Abraham, ca. 1985. Built circa 1845 and originally constructed for the First Methodist Protestant Church, the Greek Revival building was occupied by a second church before it became a synagogue by the start of the 20th century. The first Jewish community to use the house of worship was the First Congregation Galiz Duckler Mogen Abaraham in 1905. They were a congregation of immigrants from Galicia, a historic region near modern day Poland and Ukraine. The synagogue later was called simply Congregation Morgan Abraham. Still standing and functioning as a house of worship in the early 1970s, it was the only synagogue in the city without indoor plumbing. The front wall of the building collapsed in 1989 and the building was soon after demolished.

A rendering of C.B.J. Snyder’s Public School 160 at the corner of Suffolk and Rivington Streets.

Houston Street — that's HOW-stun, for the first-time visitors — has seen many changes since it was mapped as the southern boundary of Manhattan's famous street grid under the Commissioners' Plan of 1811. In fact, the 1811 plan was the first time the street, named for William Houstoun, was spelled "Houston." The misspelling stuck. Houstoun was the Georgia-born son of Sir Patrick Houstoun, a Scottish aristocrat and member of the state's colonial Government. The younger Houstoun represented Georgia at the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention of 1787, where he met Mary Bayard, of the prominent Manhattan family, whom he married in 1788. The original segment of Houstoun's namesake street was part of the Bayard family's property. Over the ensuing decades, Houston was merged with neighboring thoroughfares (North Street on the east side; Hammersley Street on the west) until it spanned the breadth of the entire island. This walk covers the tumultuous early decades of the 20th century, when subway construction and increased automobile traffic molded Houston into its current form. Let's take a look!

Bialystoker Synagogue, ca, 1977. The fieldstone Methodist Episcopal Church was built in 1826, using Manhattan schist from a quarry on nearby Pitt Street. Founded by a group of Jews who came from town of Białystok in present-day Poland, the congregation purchased the building at 7 Willett Street in 1907.

Delancey Approach to the Williamsburg Bridge ca. 1919 Linking Manhattan and Brooklyn, the Williamsburg Bridge opened in 1903. The first person to cross it was Wally Owen in his fifty-six horsepower Speedster. Owen's round trip was clocked at six minutes and fifty seconds; several policemen wandering about on the bridge barely escaped injury. The bridge was dubbed the Jews' Highway by the press because it opened rural Williamsburg to Jewish immigrants seeking to escape the crowded Lower East Side.

Building at the intersection of East Houston Street, First Street, Avenue A, and Essex Street; April 3, 1935. The four-story tenement building appears in Manhattan insurance maps as early as 1859, and occupied a slender flatiron plot at the intersection of Houston and First Streets, roughly where the present-day median begins on the east side of the intersection. The building, usually numbered 2-4 Avenue A, survived the 1930s-era widening of Essex and Houston Streets to make room for the construction of the new IND Houston-Essex Line subway, which today carries the F train. It even has a brief filmic cameo in The Naked City, a beloved 1948 film noir set in and around the Lower East Side. The building was razed in 1955, when Houston Street was again widened in order to accommodate two-way traffic.

Welcome to 155 Rivington Street. Before you climb the stairs, step back and take a look at its elegant facade. Think of all the people that have passed through this space over its 117-year history. From horse and buggies, through prohibition, and the great depression, this building has seen a lot.

“Mikveh of the Lower East Side, 311-313 East Broadway. Originally Young Men's Benevolent Association.” 311-313 East Broadway has variously been home to: Wall Street broker James E. Betts (1842); an illegal “gambling house,” raided by police (1842); the Young Men’s Benevolent Association, a Jewish community organization who commissioned its current, eclectic designed building (1899-1914); the Arnold Toynbee House, later renamed the Grand Street Settlement (1918-1936); and the Mikvah of Lower East Side, a Jewish ritual bath house (1941-present). Today, a plaque reading “ritualarium” marks the entrance to the mikvah.

141 Attorney Street (at the far right) is the only building in this photo that current still stands. The school in the center (P.S. 174) was demolished and Attorney Street was severed by a cul-de-sac.

511 Grand Street ARCHITECT: Unknown DATE: 1827-28 STYLE: Federal 511 Grand Street House was constructed by real estate investors Henry Barclay and James Lent Along with its neighbor 513 Grand Street it is a rare surviving example of the Federal style in Manhattan. It retains its original 2½-story height, peaked roof with dormers and side entrance. It is three-bays wide due to the irregular shape of the lot. The house since the 1840s has continuously housed both residential tenants and businesses reflecting its location on Grand Street a major east-west thoroughfare.

Essex Street, west side, from Rivington to Houston Streets, March 13, 1932. In the center of the frame (mid block between Rivington and Stanton Streets) is no. 147. It is a simple five-story tenement building. In 1917 comic book creator Jack Kirby was born in an apartment in this building.

Hamilton Fish Pool, under construction, April 26, 1935.

174 Delancey Street, viewed from the Williamsburg Bridge. Detail of upper stories.

Hamilton Fish Park Gymnasium, June 29, 1938.

After the 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression, selling apples became a popular way to help now-unemployed New Yorkers eke out a living.

Public School 160, ca. 1920. Designed by C.B.J. Snyder in 1898, 107 Suffolk Street was home to P.S. 160 until its closure in 1976. The Dutch Neo-Gothic building was completed in 1898. Today the building houses the Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center whose mission is to nurture and develop Puerto Rican and Latino arts in the Lower East Side.