“Street scene of peddlers and street vendors on Hester Street on the Lower East Side in 1898.” At the turn of the century, Hester Street was known for its open-air push cart market, one of many hubs for Lower East Side vendors. The tenement buildings in this photo — likely on the North side of Hester Street, near Norfolk and Suffolk Streets — were soon demolished to make way for the campus of the P.S. 62 intermediate school, which opened in 1905.

In the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, one of New York's most powerful mayors, launched a war against an enemy that was ubiquitous on New York's streets: Pushcarts.

Abraham Cahan, leader, publisher, and writer, was the founding editor of the Forward, America's oldest independent Jewish news organization. Born in 1860, to an Orthodox family in Podberzhie a small shtetl near Vilna (Vilnius) Lithuania, in what is today Belarus, the unorthodox, socialist Cahan had been a revolutionary in his youth. He identified with the narodny (folks) movement that opposed the Czar and briefly believed in a kind of agricultural socialism. Escaping the Czar’s secret police along with his fellow communards of the Am Olam, movement, Cahan arrived in the U.S. in 1882 with the idea of creating agricultural communes here.

There are many distinguished people featured in the Hall of Fame of Great Americans at Bronx Community College. One who stands apart as a true community leader is Lillian Wald, the nurse, activist, and author renowned for establishing the Henry Street Settlement (HSS) and the Visiting Nurse Service of New York (VNSNY).

From its earliest days, New York has been a city in a hurry. But luckily, from hot dog carts to taco trucks, there have always been places to grab a bite on the go. This week we combed our archives for photos and history of street food in New York.