The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  The effect was an unprecedentedly large city of 359 square miles, one whose population had instantly rocketed to 3.4 million from 2 million. Only London, of all the world’s cities, was larger. Chicago, proudly resurgent after its 1871 fire, no longer threatened to become the nation’s first city.

  “Consolidation is a tame word for such a magnificent moment,” Robert A. Caro, the historian, said. “What we’re celebrating is the moment the city received critical mass.”

  To celebrate that moment, there will be museum exhibitions, lectures, seminars and an official tourism campaign. The Convention and Visitors Bureau has created a logo and plans a national ad campaign for “New York History Year,” and Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani boasts that the celebration comes at a time when New York has bounced back, citing lower crime and increased tourism. “This is a very wonderful time for the city,” he said.

  But plans for a performance of the “Jubilee March of the Greater New-York” by W. C. Parker, believed to have been performed only once, have been reluctantly postponed until Jan. 1, 1998, the centennial of the date on which consolidation became effective.

  “Put it this way,” explained Schuyler G. Chapin, commissioner of cultural affairs and former general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. “The piece cannot be learned overnight.”

  MANHATTAN

  Living Where So Many Do Business

  February 3, 1929

  Downtown Manhattan today.

  FEW OF THE SOME 500,000 PEOPLE WHO pass daily through the business area of furthest downtown New York realize that aside from its 9 to 5 o’clock dwellers it has approximately 12,500 permanent residents. The tip of Manhattan was and is a community settlement. Its borders still embrace the nation’s first port of entry, the city’s seat of government. Now as then, printeries, taverns, fish markets, warehouses, law offices, hospitals, shops, recreation centers, mingle oddly together, combining their varied interests into a composite whole. The old village today is as truly an integral unit of community life and purpose as it was in its yesterdays—that yesterday in 1661, for example, when the first ferry piled the North River to Jersey City.

  As world problems became intense and complex, even so did life and conditions in far downtown. In 1915 the Bowling Green Neighborhood Association was formed. It was pledged to attend to the “social and health problems of the district.” The association outgrew its quarters at 45 West Street and in 1926 moved into its new home at 107 Washington Street, whence it reaches out to serve not only the 12,500 permanent residents, but some of the 500,000 business “dwellers.”

  Clinics have been established, and Public Health nurses literally “feel the pulse” of the neighborhood. Through them the association learns the needs and wins the confidence of the population. Daily they come into intimate contact with the families of the district, acting as the messengers of science and guiding the busy mothers in the application of its principles. Last year nurses made 4,500 visits to the homes in the district.

  Near Ground Zero, A Mixed-Use Revival

  By PATRICK MCGEEHAN | September 9, 2007

  SIX YEARS AGO, IN THE AFTERSHOCK OF THE terrorist attack that reduced the World Trade Center to a smoldering pile, local officials wondered whether people would want to live or work around the financial district again.

  Today, as new residents fill converted office buildings and jam the raucous block party that erupts nightly on Stone Street, the more likely curiosity about Lower Manhattan is: Where did all these people come from, and how can they afford to live here?

  Despite the slow pace of reconstruction at ground zero, the area below Chambers Street is humming with activity, much of it designed to appeal to the well-heeled professionals who are transforming the neighborhood. Already, it has added hundreds of condominium units and hotel rooms, a thriving restaurant row, a private school charging $27,000 a year, a free wireless Internet service, a BMW dealership and an Hermès boutique.

  “There were very few who would have predicted that Lower Manhattan would have rebounded as quickly as it has, despite all of the false starts and delays and emotional overlays,” said Carl Weisbrod, president of Trinity Real Estate and former president of the Alliance for Downtown New York.

  But the rebound has left some downtown merchants with mixed feelings. Karena Nigale has found the new financial district to be more attractive as a place to run a business, but less affordable as a place to live. Since 9/11, she has opened two hair salons within a few blocks of the New York Stock Exchange.

  Ms. Nigale lived above her first salon until the din from carousers on the street below, along with a rent increase of more than 30 percent, drove her out. “I need two bedrooms, and there’s nothing for less than $4,000 a month around here,” said Ms. Nigale, who moved to Jersey City with her 11-year-old daughter.

  Her business, though, is thriving. Her customers all have “big watches, expensive handbags,” and no qualms about the cost of her services, she said.

  Downtown: Not Just Wall Street

  By MURRAY SCHUMACH | April 29, 1971

  EVERY WEEKDAY, FROM EARLY MORNING until mid-afternoon, a minibus leaves Beekman Downtown Hospital to pick up the elderly and infirm for treatment from Chinatown, Little Italy and the Spanish and Jewish areas of the Lower East Side.

  And any time there is a serious emergency south of Canal Street—fire in a skyscraper, accident in a subway, clashes at City Hall—patients wind up in the emergency ward of Beekman.

  To millions who live in and around the city, or come as tourists, the downtown area is a place to work or gawk. But to Beekman, the only hospital between Canal Street and the Battery, this area is a neighborhood.

  For sheer contrast there are few sections in the world like lower Manhattan. It has Wall Street and street vendors; the sailing vessels of the past at the South Street Seaport Museum and batteries of the latest computers; the world’s greatest complex of banks and a sprawl of low-cost housing. It has colleges, hot-dog carts, historic churches and stores that sell anything from electronic parts to exotic fish.

  Since 1960, the area’s resident population has jumped from about 20,000 to more than 30,000. Ambitious plans by the state and city provide for low-, middle- and luxury-income housing in Battery Park City that will raise the resident population to 100,000 during the 1980’s.

  The working population is already about 460,000, according to the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association, with the World Trade Center still incomplete.

  “It has been estimated,” said a man at the City Planning Commission, “that if everyone working or living in the area came out on the street at the same time, they would be standing two-and-a-half persons on top of one another all over the place.”

  But residents find the area has its advantages. Those with city, state or federal jobs in the vicinity of Foley Square, or with private jobs in the financial district, can walk to work. And security measures in the South Bridge Mitchell-Lama cooperative are extraordinary. Every tenant has an identification card as well as keys. A security guard is at every door and the doors are locked from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

  “I was living in the Village,” said Zelva Rogers, who was moving in the other day. “It was a tiny studio apartment. Here I’ll have three rooms and a terrace. And this is a fascinating area.”

  Reporter Tours Through the District Where Conditions Are the Worst

  June 13, 1908

  Orchard Street on the Lower East Side in the early 1900’s.

  MRS. MEYER FRANKEL, WIFE OF DR. FRANKEL of 248 East Broadway, both of whom are members of the Children’s Relief Committee, which is providing a free meal each day to any child at the lunchroom at 106 Canal Street, took a reporter from The Times on a tour of the Lower East Side yesterday. A Jewish family occupying two rooms at 21 Forsyth Street was the first visited.

  They were the Sluzkins, the mother a widow, with three children and an old grandmother. The mother, the only breadwinner, is a firemen’s nurse when she is well, but she was lying ill in a bed by the
window in the living room yesterday. The children were playing.

  A respectable looking neighbor came in to help in explaining their situation. “What have they to eat?” she said, repeating a question. “Nothing at all. I believe that is half the cause of the mother’s illness, and they are not able to pay their rent, and I suppose they will have to go.”

  The children have gone to the lunchroom for one meal a day since it was started on Tuesday.

  Louis Adler is a tailor at 53 Orchard Street who has been out of work for months. “It is $7 a month that I pay for my rent, and my landlord is a good man,” he said. “He takes $2 or $3 when I can give it to him. But now it is two months and a half that it is not paid. He says that there are many who do not pay, and he can wait no longer.”

  Mrs. Frankel said that lack of work caused by hard times was responsible for much of the destitution.

  “I know a number of traveling men,” she said, “who bring in orders that give this part of the city much of its work. They went out this spring, but came back with practically no orders, and that meant no work. I know factories where 700 persons are usually employed, but where they are laying off 20 and 40 at a time now.”

  Trendiness Among The Tenements

  By JOSEPH BERGER | September 2, 2004

  H. ECKSTEIN & SONS WAS NOT QUITE AS much a fixture of the Lower East Side as Guss’s Pickles or Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery. Still, Brenda Zimmer spent much of her life there, haggling with customers in the cramped and hectic clothing store on Orchard Street that her family owned, hanging on until it finally shut its doors in 1998.

  When she told friends a few years ago that her daughter, Amy, a 28-year-old Yale graduate and freelance writer, was moving into one of the neighborhood’s storied tenements, “they looked a little shocked,” she said.

  “Everybody spent their lives trying to get out of there, and my daughter is trying to come back,” Mrs. Zimmer said.

  The rapid changes in a neighborhood famous as the squalid foothold for immigrants just off the boat have produced more than a few such expressions of astonishment. There are still many people around who were glad to escape the neighborhood when the old life seemed to be seeping out of it more than a half-century ago. Some of them are now wonderstruck as their adventurous children and grandchildren return.

  Mrs. Zimmer seemed tickled that her daughter had actually settled a few blocks from where Amy’s grandfather was born and where Mrs. Zimmer worked full time for 15 years. Sure, only a handful of the wholesale and retail stores were still around. But the neighborhood had once again quickened to life, something closer to the bustle of the days when the walk-up tenements were teeming and the dowdy stores drew shoppers from all over for their Sunday bargains.

  “Now it’s exciting,” Mrs. Zimmer said. “It’s prestigious to live there.”

  Ethnic Groups Disputing Plans For Lower East Side

  March 12, 1980

  THE SWEET SMELL OF EARLY MORNING baking drifted through Edna’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side as Edna Leib, who was a refugee from postwar Europe, put down a tray of hot noodle pudding.

  “If they build more low-income housing it will kill the Jewish community here,” she said, looking out at four blocks of decrepit houses and vacant lots.

  A short distance to the north, Juan Otero waited for customers behind stacks of yucca and plátanos at La Borinqueña Meat and Vegetable Market. “Without more low-income housing,” he said, “the Spanish people here can’t survive.”

  The land between Mrs. Leib and Mr. Otero is the focus of an emotional dispute, soon to be heard by the Board of Estimate, over housing, jobs, ethnic origins and the future of a neighborhood that has long been known as a first home for immigrants in America. Through the years, as community groups fought over whose project would be built, the site has been dormant.

  A group of mainly Hispanic organizations wants low-income housing built on the site. A coalition of Jewish organizations wants a shopping mall, to create jobs. And a Chinese-American social service agency wants a project to house some of the thousands of elderly Chinese workers living in tenements a few blocks away.

  All three are preparing for a battle at the Board of Estimate over a proposal by City Hall to give each group at least part of what it wants: 100 units of low-income housing, a 150-unit project for Chinatown’s elderly and space for new businesses on a strip of land along Delancey Street between Essex Street and the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge. The Koch administration says the plan offers the best hope for resolving a 15-year-old issue that has grown out of decades of ethnic change in a once predominantly Jewish neighborhood.

  The United Jewish Council of the Lower East Side, its offices on a block where 13 brownstone synagogues stand shoulder to shoulder, opposes the compromise plan. It wants to see built an enclosed three-block shopping mall, which it says would earn the city more than $1 million a year in tax revenue and create hundreds of jobs.

  “You have to build something to keep the young people and the middle-income people here,” said Mrs. Leib, whose delicatessen on Grand Street faces the site. “If you build more low-income housing, the young people leave and the neighborhood is gone.”

  The Artists’ District of Last Resort

  By GRACE GLUECK | May 11, 1970

  HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE HEARD A JAZZ CONCERT on Wooster Street over the weekend, watched Eddie Johnson build a cardboard sculpture in Greene Street, and visited 20 artists’ lofts on West Broadway. The more adventurous walked through a water fountain hitched to a fire hydrant and basked in a “fog-light-sound” environment by Bill Birch.

  These, and nearly 100 other loft and performance events, were part of a three-day festival that flowered in the dingy blocks of SoHo, the burgeoning artists’ community in downtown Manhattan.

  SoHo’s name does not derive from the Soho section of London, but instead from South Houston Industrial District, the City Planning Commission’s one-time designation for what was originally the nation’s leading red-light district.

  Today, although its 50-odd blocks are sadly dilapidated, it is a virtual outdoor museum of cast-iron architecture, extensively used here in the 1860’s for elegant commercial buildings. But Many SoHo residents object to the name, suggestive as it is of the grubby Bohemian district in London that the area here does not resemble.

  “It’s just another example of the American inferiority complex about European names,” grumbled Ivan Karp, a former uptown art dealer who recently opened a gallery on West Broadway. As a name for the neighborhood, Mr. Karp prefers Hell’s Hundred Acres, a sobriquet that the area apparently once bore because there were so many fires there.

  Whatever its designation, SoHo is a kind of last resort for artists, the only area left in Manhattan where the loft space they need is still available at reasonable rates. But because the City Planning Commission has zoned it for light manufacturing only, they live there illegally. They do not get such city services as garbage collection, and they are constantly in conflict with building and fire regulations.

  And the artists have cause to worry about their future in the neighborhood. Some real estate developers would jump at the chance to replace the buildings with profitable high-rises. And some would like to see the entire area razed for middle-income housing.

  “Right now, the best thing we can do is to leave SoHo the way it is,” said Mike Levine, the young planner in charge of Greenwich Village for the Planning Commission. “The artists are an extremely vital cultural industry.”

  SoHo Grows Up Rich and Chic

  By FRED FERRETTI | October 12, 1975

  ONLY A FEW YEARS AGO, SOHO WAS A PLACE where artists wandered, uninvited, into Larry Poons’s loft for his weekly anybody-drop-in party. Nowadays, the social scene there is a great deal less casual. More characteristic, perhaps, is Robert Rauschenberg, wearing suits made entirely of sewn-together neckties, giving a chic by-invitation-only party for Princess Christina of Sweden—with salmon flown in fresh from the fjords—to the d
elight of such guests as Henry Geldzahler, August Heckscher, Robert Scull and other uptown culture mavens.

  This change in party style is expressive of SoHo’s transformation from a low-rent district for artists to a playground of uptown chic. Ten years ago, for $100 a month, artists could live and work in 2,500 square feet of high-ceilinged lofts in this area south of Houston Street. Today, SoHo is no longer cheap. Lofts are co-op apartments which sell for as much as $150,000 to doctors and psychoanalysts.

  Some artists have stayed and accommodated themselves to the changes in their district—in fact, some say they like the diversity of the “new” SoHo—but others have fled, believing that SoHo is on its way to becoming another Greenwich Village, possessing a tradition of art but producing little worthwhile art, becoming a stage on which other aspects of culture ape the visual arts that inspired them.

  Says artist Paul Harbut, “SoHo can’t be isolated just for artists. It’s sad.

  You just can’t preserve it as an artists’ neighborhood … the artists have become cynically promoted. They’ve become technocrats, and the galleries lean to those painters who produce work done with a saleable technique.”

  Roy Lichtenstein’s Guggenheim Museum poster sells for $15 in Poster Originals—another uptowner now downtown—but it’s $500 signed. And dealer Ivan Karp, in his O.K. Harris Gallery across the street, offers a set of four photo-offset reproductions of artists in his stable for $275, framed, to the tourists awed by his Warhol Campbell Soup wall hanging.