The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York

by Joseph Berger

  “People would go into a building and shoot up and end up on my doorstep,” he told me. “I could barely get a mortgage. No one wanted to come here. Now it's totally different—the antithesis of what had been here. We essentially promote art which is hybrid. We will not show pure painting. We will not show pure sculpture. We are looking for artists who break the barriers between disciplines and cultures.”

  My quest for a pair of relatives who could embody the dramatic changes I had witnessed took weeks of calling around; there were many eligible young people, but their grandparents or parents either were dead or lived in Florida and could not easily revisit the Lower East Side they had forsaken decades ago. I finally came up with a good enough match in Brenda Zimmer and her daughter, Amy. Brenda Zimmer's father was born on Delancey and Eldridge and she had spent much of her life working at H. Eckstein and Sons, a cramped and hectic clothing store on Orchard Street that her family owned until it succumbed in 1998. “I went to help and I never left,” she told me, relating how in 1983 she was asked to lend a hand just for the Christmas season and ended up spending fifteen years haggling with customers. Yet when she tells friends that Amy, a Yale graduate and freelance writer, had moved into one of the neighborhood's storied tenements, “they look a little shocked.” “Every-body spent their lives trying to get out of there, and my daughter is trying to come back,” Mrs. Zimmer told me.

  I met Mrs. Zimmer and Amy at Gertel's Bakery. The mother was a plump, dark-haired Bette Midler carbon copy, high-spirited and outrageously playful in her bona fide NooYawk accent. She worked as a guidance counselor in Brooklyn. Amy was slim and serious, a writer for alternative publications such as City Limits and Metro. She had long sandy hair and a chiseled face that made her seem younger than her age at the time, twenty-eight, and was dressed in an old-fashioned man's shirt, a droll statement on her part, since the shirt was inherited from H. Eckstein's.

  In the bakery's dowdy dining corner, we had a cup of coffee and some rugelach, and then we began our stroll through the old neighborhood. Mrs. Zimmer seemed tickled that her daughter had actually settled a few blocks from where Amy's grandfather was born and where the family store stood. Sure, only a handful of the hosiery, lingerie, and handbag stores—wholesale or retail—were still around, and even many of the bodegas of a more recent era of migration were gone. But the neighborhood had once again quickened to life, to something closer to the bustle of the days when the walk-up tenements were teeming and the stores drew shoppers from all over for their Sunday bargains. “Now it's exciting; it's prestigious to live there!” Mrs. Zimmer observed with a wry edge.

  A few doors down from Gertel's was Brown, a hole-in-the-wall café with outdoor tables and seats made artfully—if not quite comfortably— of wooden blocks, and its gourmet market spin-off, Orange. “Who would think it, a café on Hester Street?” Mrs. Zimmer said as Amy chuckled. “It's all new to me.”

  We could see that dry-goods shops had been replaced by French, Japanese, and other exotic restaurants with such eye-popping adornments as leopard-skin upholstery, and boutiques where the tastefully spaced wares were fashionably retro but the prices decidedly nouveau. One shop, Toys in Babeland, both amused and embarrassed Mrs. Zimmer as she browsed through. It sells dildos and vibrators in a variety of raunchy styles. “A very unusual store,” Mrs. Zimmer observed, gathering up her dignity. “Colorful!”

  Some new shops are beguiling in their deceptions or laced with contradictions. A store on Stanton Street that still carries the original overhead sign “Louis Zuflacht-Smart Clothes” actually sells offbeat glassware and pottery. The dramatic yellow and black sign for Sol Moscot, the optician on the corner of Delancey and Orchard whose horn-rimmed-glasses logo reminded me of the eyes of Dr. T. Eckleburg looking over the valley of ashes in The Great Gatsby, actually contains an espresso shop, the Bean. (The fourth-generation family-owned glasses maker, which has been on the Lower East Side since 1915, has moved to the second floor, above the sign.) The vintage sign “Pianos, New & Used, Bought & Sold, Incredible Prices” lingers over the entrance to a bar that features live bands and mango martinis. Lolita Bar on Broome Street is around the corner from Lolita Bras. Others are just sadly altered. The Garden Cafeteria is now the Wing Shoon Seafood Restaurant. Garden was a proudly working-class eatery with long steaming tables of standard cafeteria fare highlighted by Jewish delicacies. When you walked in, you were given a ticket with columns of numbers and, as you ordered, servers would punch in the running total. Emma Goldman, Trotsky, even Fidel Castro went through this ritual. Isaac Bashevis Singer chronicled the customers ensconced at tables for hours at a time “shouting their opinions of Zionism, Jewish Socialism, the life and culture of America.” Not only is the cafeteria gone, but the building it is in, the Forward building, which once housed the left-wing Yiddish newspaper, then went through several Chinese incarnations, is now a luxury condo apartment house, with the penthouse selling for $4.5 million and onetime movie stars such as Tatum O'Neal coming to look.

  As the Zimmers, mère and fille, ambled with me, the sounds of renovating hammers and saws could be heard everywhere. We learned that a condominium on Essex Street had sold for $2 million, and saw a glass-and-aluminum-walled twenty-story hotel rising on Rivington Street with the self-conscious name the Hotel on Rivington. This is on a block where pushcarts once plied and where seventy-year-old Economy Candy still sells its cornucopia of 1950s candy—Mary Jane nougat bars, Good & Plenty, Jordan almonds, and chocolate cigarettes. Jerry Cohen, who was born on Suffolk Street and now owns the store where his father worked as a salesman, remembered that just ten years before “we used to lock the door and run and never look behind us—it was so drug infested.” Now he stays open after dark. Unlike the out-of-fashion clothing merchants, he has something the young people still want—an encyclopedic variety of sweets at decent prices. But he is himself surprised by the glittery influx. “When grandchildren tell the grandparents, they say, ‘We were always trying to get out of here; why would you want to come back?’” he told me. Cohen also has to explain such old-fashioned treats as halvah. Some of the young newcomers think it's a kind of cheese.

  Tenement apartments still sit above the clusters of vanguard stores. Young people like Amy Zimmer appreciate this stock of brick walk-ups laced with fire escapes—the unmall, unhomogenized feel of the place. And they say they like the human mix of Chinese, Latinos, bohemians, along with the barely clinging Old World shopkeepers. Amy lives in a fourth-floor studio in a tenement below Delancey Street where the boiler frequently breaks down—letting her claim the fashionably ironic distinction of living in a cold-water flat. Her older brother Larry lives on the second floor, and so, their mother says, he can keep an eye out for her when she comes home late. After growing up in a ranch house in the homogeneous suburb of Pomona in Rockland County, Amy likes having neighbors who are Cantonese, and she likes shopping at the stalls in the Essex Street Market, an indoor city-run market created by Mayor La Guardia to lure the pushcarts off the narrow streets. “I knew I was crossing the threshold and walking into a different era,” she told me.

  In that she is representative of the changes in the neighborhood, as young, degree-laden professionals from the Midwest or eastern trust-fund babies move in among the Chinese and Latino immigrants. The census shows that 7 percent of the neighborhood's 51,500 residents had graduate degrees in 2000 compared to 4.8 percent ten years before. The average household income had shot up to $40,884 from $25,327 in 1990, in inflation-adjusted dollars. The median value for an owner-occupied dwelling doubled to $170,588 from $85,725. Among the more recent residents are Greenwich-raised techno-musician Moby, who has a loft here and opened a vegan bistro called Teany on Rivington. Another resident is the Russian émigré novelist Gary Shteyngart, who worked for a time as a grant writer for the neighborhood's bedrock cultural center, the Educational Alliance (one grandmother I knew of long ago called the place “the Education of Lions”). While living in a Clinton Street tenement, he wrote m
uch of his breakout comic novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, which pays homage to the changing streets of the Lower East Side. With his writer's earnings, Shteyngart now lives in one of the middle-class co-ops on Grand Street.

  Amy and her mother finally arrived at the corner of Orchard and Grand, where Eckstein's once thrived. Its place was now taken by Sheila's Decorating, an upscale fabric and furnishings store. Eckstein's was started by Amy's great-great-grandfather and his three sons in 1916 as a pushcart and grew into a rambling, two-level store that sold jeans, sportswear, and sweaters. As a teenager, Amy helped out on weekends and recorded her affectionate memories on the website “Mr. Beller's Neighborhood.” “Mounds of jeans were piled in the basement and since the store had no dressing rooms, people would try things on behind stacks of Wranglers and Levis,” she wrote. “Shelves of brown cardboard boxes stuffed with underwear lined the walls; to get a pair, a salesperson would climb wooden ladders precariously affixed to a bar just below the tin ceiling.”

  When Mrs. Zimmer stepped inside Sheila's Decorating, the ghosts overwhelmed her. “There was the hosiery department,” she said, pointing to where bolts of damask and silk had replaced the socks. “There was ladies' sweaters. When you walked back there you had the underwear department. Hanes! Jockey!” She recalled how hundreds of people would crowd the store every Sunday. “When you went into the store you were mesmerized,” Mrs. Zimmer said. “There was no such thing as hours. You left when the last customer left.” One Sunday the wife of Yitzhak Shamir, then the prime minister of Israel, dropped in to bring some bargains back to Jerusalem.

  Even in 1998 the store never accepted credit cards and the sales taxes were pasted on a chart on the ancient cash register, though Amy's brother Larry, who worked there full-time, could figure out the tax in his head. Amy and her mother remembered how Amy's dogged great-uncle Herbert would not let anyone leave the store without buying something. “He had an interesting rapport,” Mrs. Zimmer said. “He found out your whole life history in five minutes.” If someone haggled, Herbert might be called in and use code to offer his bottom line. “Give it to them for S.E.X.” might mean $8.50. His salesman's zeal made him such a prominent local personality that the now-defunct Grand Dairy Restaurant named a sandwich, “the Professor,” after another one of his attributes. It was an open-face tuna on whole wheat with coleslaw on the side.

  As she gazed around, Mrs. Zimmer patted a spot over her heart. “It's sad when I come here,” she said. “I grew up here and now it feels foreign.”

  To Amy, the Lower East Side was “my family's second home,” and as a child and teenager Amy was bewitched by the clamorous streets and the dinners at Ratner's or Schmulka Bernstein. Still, she recalled how she “wasn't allowed to walk anywhere by myself ” because of the neighborhood's other large commerce—crack cocaine. Seward Park, across from the high school her mother had attended, “was a flea market for drugs.”

  As we continued our tour, there were places that brought out laughter as well as tears. At Gorelick's clothing on Orchard Street, Mrs. Zimmer offered a cheery greeting to the owner, Bernard Gorelick, whom she hadn't seen since Eckstein's closed.

  “How are you, Bernie?” she said. “

  I'm an old man,” he answered plaintively.

  Irving Gellis, his wizened salesman, waxed lyrical about the old days. “There was room for everybody; everybody lived in peace,” Gellis said of the rival merchants. “They were all invited to each other's affairs. It was one big family, Orchard Street. But the whole neighborhood has changed with all these yuppies moving in. They must have money like dirt. They're paying a dollar seventy-five for a cup of coffee. We thought these people are crazy. You pay fifty cents for a cup of coffee on Delancey Street. It's a different world.”

  Gorelick informed Mrs. Zimmer that the battered seventy-year-old store—a warren of steel shelves filled with untidy cardboard boxes thick with underwear—was closing. He didn't need to bother. A hand-lettered sign in the window said, “Going Out Sale.”

  The old wholesale and retail stores have been hit hard by converging trends—the rise of national discounters such as Wal-Mart, the end of blue laws that once gave the Lower East Side a monopoly on Sunday business, and the long shutdowns on the Williamsburg Bridge for repairs that halted traffic into the Orchard Street district. Always an optimist, Joseph E. Cunin, until 2006 the executive director of the Lower East Side Business Improvement District, told me that “there is no point in selling a cheap handbag on the Lower East Side. You can go to Kmart. But if you want a beautiful handbag at a good price, you come here.” Perhaps the biggest catalyst for the neighborhood's turnover was the paradox of retailing success—the storeowners sent their children to college, and with their degrees the children were not about to take over the family businesses. Jerry Cohen sent his son to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. While the son works at the store during the summer, the father says flatly, “Do I need him here at six dollars an hour?”

  When Amy announced in 2000 that she was moving to the Lower East Side, Mrs. Zimmer was candidly concerned. The streets were noirishly desolate at night and still not carefree in the daytime. Now, on the walk, Amy wanted her mother to share her delight in the neighborhood's quirky liveliness. She showed her 88 Orchard Street, a popular watering hole that sells panini and herb omelets, not to mention prosciutto.

  “This is something—prosciutto on Orchard Street,” Mrs. Zimmer said. “And I bet they're open Saturday.”

  “I bet they are,” Amy shot back with a laugh.

  Amy likes the human scale of the Lower East Side, the narrow streets, and the relatively low-slung buildings. She likes such places as the Pink Pony Café and the Sunshine Bakery on Rivington Street. She and her mother passed the Michele Olivieri shop, which was selling alligator shoes for $399—on sale—and advertised a website—moshoes.com.

  “Website?” Mrs. Zimmer remarked. “We didn't have a computer. Everything was on paper. We added up bills in our head. We had a calculator, but it was for emergencies.” The new neighborhood was no longer the old neighborhood.

  “I'm not used to it,” she said, passing a final judgment. “It's too modern for me. It's not authentic Orchard Street. You could be on Madison Avenue.”

  Madison Avenue? On the Lower East Side? That was an exaggeration. But Mrs. Zimmer's remark reflected the astonishing arc not just of the neighborhood but of all of New York City, as the pressures of immigration, real estate development, and the eternal attraction of this throbbing, enchanting metropolis for young people from the hinterland make over its face and soul. New York is always transfiguring, and when this book is read twenty years from now, much of it will be badly outdated, so rapidly will the city's neighborhoods continue to change. New immigrants will become old immigrants and they will forsake lower-rung neighborhoods for ones further up the ladder, transforming both the places they leave and the places they move into. And who can predict who will take their place—perhaps some newer immigrants from some country New Yorkers have scarcely encountered as yet or another generation of Amy Zimmers looking for something novel their parents never imagined. With all that swirling change, it is important to take snapshots in time, as the Zimmers and I were doing, to hold on to what's there for a fleeting moment in conversation and memory because one day soon, what's there will be very different indeed.

  As we were about to turn the corner onto Houston Street to conclude our tour by savoring pastrami and corned beef sandwiches at Katz's, the last of the great Lower East Side delis, we passed a store called Las Venus. The sign in the window claimed that the store sells “vintage” furniture. The furniture, though, is from the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.

  “This,” Mrs. Zimmer asked, “is vintage?”

  With matchless indiscretion, she once again captured the shifting, mutating, regenerating character of this remarkable city and its people.

  LOWER EAST SIDE

  WHERE TO GO

  Economy Candy (RETRO AND CONTEMP
ORARY CANDY) 108 RIVINGTON STREET; (800) 352-4544; www.economycandy.com

  Eldridge Street Synagogue (FIRST EASTERN EUROPEAN ORTHODOX SYNAGOGUE, DATING TO 1887) 12 ELDRIDGE STREET; (212) 219-0903, (212) 219-0888

  Essex Street Market (CREATED BY FIORELLO LA GUARDIA TO LURE THE PUSHCARTS OFF THE STREETS) 120 ESSEX STREET, BETWEEN BROOME AND STANTON STREETS; www.essexstreetmarket.com

  For ward Building (WHERE THE YIDDISH PAPER WAS PRODUCED) 175 EAST BROADWAY

  Orchard Street (A ROW OF OLD, CLUTTERED CLOTHING SHOPS—A HANDFUL STILL JEWISH-OWNED)

  Russ & Daughters (LOX, HERRING, AND DRIED FRUITS) 179 EAST HOUSTON STREET; (212) 475-4880; www.russanddaughters.com

  Seward Park Public Library 192 EAST BROADWAY; (212) 477-6770

  Tenement Museum (A TOUR THROUGH AN ACTUAL TENEMENT, HISTORICALLY FURNISHED, AND STORIES OF THE ACTUAL RESIDENTS) 108 ORCHARD STREET; (212) 431-0233; www.tenement.org

  WHERE TO EAT

  Falai (NEO-ITALIAN, NEO–LOWER EAST SIDE) 68 CLINTON STREET; (212) 25 3-1960