Last night, I found the most interesting link to old NYC, the old streets....and what is there at present. I had some German ancestors who came the America by 1843, and for awhile, were living on Sheriff Street, and a friend living on Attorney Street a few blocks away. Have always wondered what was there now, and wonders of the Internet....what I found is below. The link shows pictures as well as many of the old streets.....
One simply has to wonder if we had had ancestors who cried and whined every minute of the day about "nobody is giving us enough"....what would have happened.
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forgotten-ny.com
The Street Necrology of the Lower East Side in NYC
The Lower East Side of Manhattan, roughly defined by Houston Street on the north, the East River on the east and south, and by the Manhattan Bridge and the Bowery on the west, known in story and song as a teeming, bustling magnet for immigrants in the 19h and 20th Centuries, actually has a long and varied history. In the 17th and early 18th centuries, it was primarily countryside and farmland; the it attracted ship captains and wealthy landowners such as Rutgers and Delancey, whose names still are prominent on local street signs; and then came wave after wave of immigrants, first the Irish, escaping the potato famine and British repression in the 1860s...then the Germans in such numbers that the area became known as Kleindeutschland...and finally Eastern Europeans, many of them Jewish, starting in earnest in the mid-1880s, escaping repression in their homelands.
The tenement, as in other parts of New York City, was the dominant form of housing with hundreds of people occupying the same building, in some cases. Crowding, freezing cold in winter, and stifling heat in summer were the norm. Reform came only slowly.
Beginning in the 1930s, whole blocks began to be razed as 'slum clearance' gave way to housing projects, and an entire neighborhood was transformed. Entire streets disappeared too, and we'll try to name them all here |
