by Pete Hamill
Here was their American life: the stench of tenements, the streets jammed with pushcarts, endless temptations for the young. Most flats shared toilets in the hall. The few bathtubs were located in the kitchen. The streets were worse. Those temptations could be very real. Some of the young became gangsters. According to historian Albert Fried, some of the young women were lured into prostitution, seduced by Jewish pimps called “cadets”; some of the women were drugged and shipped off to the mining camps of the West. The favored targets of the cadets were red-haired Polish girls.
For most of the immigrants, the Lower East Side was a place of grueling work and invincible hope. Many of the men had no professions or came from country places like the Irish before them and the Italians who arrived later. Suddenly cast into a large, teeming, indifferent city, they took whatever work they could find, primarily in sweatshops, while their wives did piecework in the crowded kitchens. Like the Irish and Germans before them, few envisioned anything as extravagant as a career. That would be for their American children. The hope for many was to own a pushcart and then possibly a small shop. The pattern lasted for a long time.
I remember wandering the area once with a friend from the navy named Nick Ochlan. His father owned a small grocery store on East Fifth Street, where the lights were dim to save money, and the halls leading to the upstairs apartments were gloomy with twenty-watt bulbs. Nick’s father had a distended jaw, broken by Nazi goons. The family, as did the families of many shopkeepers, lived in a tiny apartment at the rear of the store. “It’s a horror,” Nick said, “but it’s better than where they came from.”
That was a second-generation version of the mantra that must have kept so many of the immigrants going. And in the Lower East Side there were things that they simply didn’t have in the shtetls they left behind. There was, to begin with, free education. The public schools were free. They were then, as now, imperfect, the teachers often impatient with the slowness of children trying to become American. But it turned out that they weren’t the only institutions for learning. New, privately financed places began to emerge, where the failures of the public schools could be repaired. Their aim was to accelerate the process of Americanization.
The impetus behind these alternative places of learning was an uneasiness rooted in class. Many of the so-called uptown Jews, those who had been more easily assimilated earlier in tolerant New York, were sniffy about the immense flood of Eastern European Jews jamming the tenements of the Lower East Side. The new arrivals spoke Yiddish, not German. They had (or so the uptown crowd thought) bad manners. To the uptown Jews, the new arrivals were locked into medieval orthodoxy, untouched by the secular influence of the Enlightenment. They would look like stereotypes to their own friends, the haughty Knickerbockers and their descendants. They could cause anti-Semitism in America.
Those who lived uptown were not, by any means, all rich. But they were all now Americans, and most were educated. The earliest arrivals, the Sephardim that included the family of Emma Lazarus, were initially uneasy with the Ashkenazi who came in the mid-nineteenth century. But in the final decades of the nineteenth century, both assimilated Sephardim and Ashkenazi looked down upon Jews from the provinces of Eastern Europe or Russia. Or, to be more precise, many did.
There were extraordinary exceptions. Some, like Emma Lazarus, accepted the duty to try to help their fellow Jews. As just one example: In 1889, wealthy German Jews created the Educational Alliance on East Broadway, one of the great glories of the city for all the years that followed. The youngest children of the Lower East Side could attend kindergarten to prepare for the public schools. Poor children could go there to use the gym or to take their first showers. They could drink pasteurized milk. They could go away to summer camp. More important, they could learn. The sculptors Louise Nevelson, Jacob Epstein, and Chaim Gross, and the painters Raphael and Moses Soyer took their first lessons in art at the Educational Alliance. David Sarnoff received his first instruction in English there, before moving on to a career that would take him to the Radio Corporation of America, where he created the National Broadcasting Company, the first radio network, in 1926. There were classes in dance. There were classes in theater. Some of the children had gifts for laughter too, and one of them, Eddie Cantor, from Eldridge Street, went on to a long career in vaudeville, radio, and movies. The Educational Alliance gave many impoverished kids the chance to dream. It still does, although the kids now are Latino or Asian or African American.
By the end of the century, the Lower East Side was dense with self-help societies, with educational centers, many of them built upon older structures left behind by the German Jews. By the turn of the century, Lillian Wald had established the Henry Street Settlement, and others were blossoming.
At the same time, two related streams were converging on the area. One was political, the other cultural. The first was a combination of socialism and European-style anarchism, which shaped a generation and helped establish the trade union movement among exploited Jews. The last of that generation could be seen in Union Square in the 1950s, grizzled soapbox orators still proclaiming the true faith of their youth. They believed in the class struggle, the iniquity of bosses, the need to organize. The world of working people had changed drastically, but they still found much evidence to fuel their anger. For them, the 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, which killed 146 workers, almost all young women, had happened the previous Saturday morning. When young, they studied the texts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, or Bakunin and Kropotkin as if they were the new Talmud. Some of them insisted they were a new kind of Jew, secular, rational, materialist, intent on making the brave new world here in New York. Some of them angrily discarded religious beliefs held in their families for a millennium, blaming them for the passive condition of too many Jews. A small number embraced the new creed of Zionism. For many of those young American Jews, the Lower East Side was always a place of manifestos, leaflets, demonstrations, marches, and, eventually, strikes. It was as if they had adopted the Irish proverb “Contention is better than loneliness.”
At the same time, a great cultural tide was rising from the immigration, and its vanguard was the Yiddish theater. It first appeared in the early 1880s and lasted until the 1930s. Some of its theaters were still on Second Avenue in the late 1950s, but except for an occasional revival starring Menasha Skulnik or Molly Picon, the surviving theaters had been absorbed by a new phenomenon called Off-Broadway. The Café Royal was gone, the place on the corner of Twelfth Street and Second Avenue where the great Yiddish actors, playwrights, directors, and impresarios once gathered, along with the finest Yiddish newspapermen, a few brilliant critics, and those who wanted to emulate them. In 1958, there were still many people alive who could talk about the departed stars, Jacob Adler, Boris Thomashefsky, Ludwig Satz, and others whose names are now engraved in the sidewalk in front of the Second Avenue Deli on the corner of Tenth Street. But there weren’t enough such people to fill theaters six days a week. In 1958, the Jewish Rialto was as dead as the Rialto on Fourteenth Street.
After almost a half century of vitality and triumph, the Yiddish theater had passed into the country of permanent New York nostalgia. Somehow, in the years after World War II, its moment had passed, the musicians had departed, there was dust on the orchestra seats and the balconies. Alas and farewell. The affection for the vanished theaters was genuine, of course, and for good reason: By all accounts, the Yiddish theater had given the city many amazements. The artists among the Yiddish performers reveled in the freedom of New York. Here, no secret policemen would descend upon them for making fun of the czar. Nobody would come knocking at their doors at midnight, and if they did, some tough Jews would throw them down the stairs. This is America, boychick! No more crap! Or so they believed, so they hoped. They looked at the city and were inspired by almost everything they saw. They must have sensed the permanent New York nostalgia, that pervasive urban emotion caused by the imaginary presence of the Old Country and the velocity o
f change in New York itself. That emotion, after all, was in their work. In the early days, after 1885, Yiddish playwrights hacked out sentimental dramas about loss and separation and heroic mothers and hardworking children. The dramas provoked cleansing tears. They gave consolation to these strangers in a strange land. Most of this work was dismissed by the Yiddish intellectuals as shund, or trash. Their judgments didn’t matter to the people jammed in the seats on Saturday nights.
But all was not shund. The creators of the American Yiddish theater also provided what earlier entertainers had given to the Irish and the Germans: the immense gift of laughter. They used gags, skits, slapstick, and wit to make fun of one another. Romanians made fun of Hungarians. Both made fun of Poles. All made fun of Russians. They skewered the greenhorns, the pompous nouveau rich, the greedy landlords, the humorless goyim, the corrupt politicians; and they added something else, an attitude that forever shifted the New York mind: irony.
That is, they made jokes out of the difference between what America promised and what America actually delivered. Irony remains the essence of American humor to this day. They were also triumphantly eclectic. The creators of the Yiddish theater made their own versions of what they saw the Irish doing in the rowdy theaters of the nearby Bowery. They attended shows on the Rialto of Fourteenth Street and took what they thought would work on Second Avenue, peppering it with wit imported from the cafés of Vienna or Berlin, the whole enlivened by the energy of the new immigrants. They adapted Shakespeare for their blue-collar audiences, giving them a Jewish Hamlet, a Jewish King Lear (with a happy ending added), and even a Jewish version of The Merchant of Venice. There were few pretensions about making high art; this was entertainment, for people who needed a respite from the grind of work and life on the margin of prosperity. Eventually, high art would emerge in the Yiddish language, in the same evolution that led from the Bowery theaters to Eugene O’Neill. It just took a while. But in their own way, the downtown Jews were repeating the pattern established by the poor Irish and Germans, and thus were becoming part of the New York alloy.
On our little piece of Second Avenue in the 1950s, there remained some monuments of that past. Across the avenue from us, between St. Mark’s Place and Ninth Street, was the Ottendorfer Branch of the New York Public Library. It’s still there, in its rich terra-cotta glory, still opening its doors to the people of the neighborhood. Those doors were first opened in 1884. The man who built the library was a wealthy German American named Oswald Ottendorfer, one of those New Yorkers who truly used his wealth to help others. He hired a German immigrant architect named William Schickel, who had worked for the famous Richard Morris Hunt, and, like Hunt, Schickel drew upon the Renaissance for his design. The entrance is an arcade, and above it are the words “Freie Bibliothek u. Leschalle” (Free Library and Reading Room). The crucial word was Freie. Oswald Ottendorfer’s purpose was simple: to provide books, newspapers, and periodicals in German and English for the poorer residents of what was then Kleindeutschland. At first the cast-iron stacks were closed, with visitors required to ask for titles. By 1890 that had changed, and the stacks were open for anyone’s scrutiny. This was America, after all, and you should be able to choose your books and find your way to surprise or even astonishment. Sometimes you might find Goethe or Schiller. Sometimes, in translation, there was Dickens, Victor Hugo, or, with any luck, Mark Twain.
Eventually, as the Eastern European Jews began to move into Kleindeutschland in larger numbers, they too found their way to the Ottendorfer. Few of them lived on Second Avenue. But they could walk uptown from the miserable tenements to the south and east, the way they walked to the Yiddish theaters. At the Ottendorfer, they discovered what all New York generations have discovered: Every library is a temple of human wisdom.
When I first visited the Ottendorfer (it was, by the way, the first branch of the New York Public Library), there were many men from the Bowery at the tables, seeking refuge from brutal New York winters. Most of them were reading. A few of them were, as New Yorkers would say, “a little ripe.” No matter. There were also Latinos who were settling in the tenements to the east and some old-fashioned bohemians. There were very few Eastern European Jews. Their children had gone to the City College of New York, had fought in two American wars, had taken full advantage of the GI Bill; they could afford to buy their own books now. But when I visited not long ago, there were computers in the main room past the arcades, all busy with seekers of information, and on a shelf near the door, pink leaflets from the library offered “Free English Classes for Speakers of Other Languages.” In a city where about two hundred languages are now spoken by the largest number of immigrants to live among us in a century, the New York Public Library is still doing its job.
Next door to the library on Second Avenue stands another building that Oswald Ottendorfer financed and William Schickel designed. It was once called simply the German Dispensary (Deutsches Dispensary), and what it dispensed was free medical care to the poor. The building is twice the size of the library, and an earlier version was built there in 1857. Those who came for its services were the same as those who used the library: Germans at first (including German Jews), and later the Eastern European Jews, and then Latinos and Bowery types and the beatniks and hippies who came to the neighborhood in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The German Dispensary was forced to change its name during the anti-German hysteria that accompanied American entry into World War I. The new name was the Stuyvesant Polyclinic. So it remains, as part of the Cabrini Medical Center. Hurting human beings still enter in search of help. Few notice the adornments of the building, the portrait busts of Hippocrates and Aesculap flanking the doors. Aesculap is surely better known as Asclepius, the son of Apollo who was the Greek and Roman god of medicine. Nor do casual passersby, or even patients, glance at the sculpted heads near the roof, properly heroic images of the English physiologist William Harvey, the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus, and others, once honored on Second Avenue, now part of New York memory too.
And part of mine. Above the cell phone store to the left of the library there was once a theater called the St. Mark’s where I saw Jean Genet’s The Balcony. Across the street, on the corner of Ninth Street, there was a small Ukrainian coffee shop where I often ate breakfast and joked with the old white-mustached man who ran the place (his name now lost in memory). It’s now three times the size of that old shop and is called the Veselka and serves a lot more than eggs and coffee. Beside it is the large building that houses the Ukrainian National Home. It once was a dance hall called the Stuyvesant Casino, which on weekends in the 1950s was used by Dixieland bands. There were many Ukrainians in the immediate neighborhood in the 1950s. Most were still called DPs, for Displaced Persons, those refugees from the horrors of Europe who were granted the right to come to America in spite of the stupid immigration laws. Some were Christians, some were Jews, all could speak to one another in the old language. They worked and they worked and they worked, and made a purchase of their own small piece of America. A Starbucks now occupies the southwest corner of Ninth and Second, but who would go there if you could find a seat at Veselka?
Down the east side of Second Avenue, just across St. Mark’s Place, is the Orpheum, once the finest of all Yiddish theaters, then a thriving Off-Broadway venue where I saw Little Mary Sunshine in some lost year and where Stomp has been running since the second Reagan administration (or so it seemed on my last visit). Across the street, just below Seventh Street, Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant is now a Met Foods supermarket. The building rising above it is NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Somewhere in that building was the Central Plaza, where a trombone player (and actor) named Conrad Janis led the Dixieland revival in the 1950s (of which the Stuyvesant Casino was a part), the music a kind of anti-bebop retro movement. There were usually big fights at least once a night and hurled beer pitchers and overturned tables and some very efficient bouncers, but on two visits I saw the great drummer Sid Catlett sit in with the group, like Michael Jor
dan playing in a schoolyard.
There was a movie house here too, called Loew’s Commodore, that became the Fillmore East, where Jefferson Airplane and the Doors and Janis Joplin came to perform, and where the Who premiered the rock opera Tommy. A passionate man named Bill Graham ran the place, and many aging fans believe that it was the greatest of all rock and roll venues. Another block away, at 91 Second Avenue, George Gershwin lived as an infant, right next door to where the “dairy” restaurant Rappoport’s once thrived. Neither Gershwin nor most of the old clientele of Rappoport’s lived to see Jefferson Airplane.
Before reaching those places, a visitor can take a right on East Seventh Street and come to McSorley’s Old Ale House, said to be the oldest drinking establishment in the city (the claim is subject to some dispute, since New Yorkers dispute almost everything). This saloon was the subject of a fine 1912 painting called McSorley’s Back Room, by John Sloan, showing a white-haired mustached man sitting in the late-morning light of a side window, his hands loosely enlaced. He wears a full dark blue overcoat, so we know it is winter. He has neither book nor newspaper on the table before him. Only a stein of ale. He seems lost in a pool of solitude and nostalgia. To the side, two other men lean toward each other, obviously murmuring but suggesting neither dark conspiracies nor sullen angers. Behind them a fire burns red in a fireplace while one of the saloon’s collection of clocks ticks away the minutes of their lives.