Lower East Side
Historic immigrant neighborhood in southeastern Manhattan, between the Bowery and the East River.
via Wikipedia: Lower East Side · see source
The Lower East Side, often shortened to LES, is a historic neighborhood in southeastern Manhattan, New York City. Today it roughly spans the Bowery to the East River and Canal to Houston streets, though it once covered a far bigger area reaching north to East 14th Street. Long a working-class home for immigrants, it began gentrifying quickly in the mid-2000s, and in 2008 the National Trust for Historic Preservation added it to its list of America's Most Endangered Places. It belongs to Manhattan Community District 3, uses ZIP Code 10002 and is covered by the 7th Precinct.
Quick Facts
- Borough
- Manhattan
- Zip code
- 10002
- Community district
- Manhattan Community District 3
- Police precinct
- 7th Precinct
Facts from the source article.
Background
Before Europeans arrived, Lenape bands moved through the area seasonally; an encampment near Corlears Hook was known as Rechtauck or Naghtogack. Under Dutch rule, farms called boweries lay north of New Amsterdam, alongside enclaves of free or half-free Africans who were among the first settlers here. Much of the land later formed James Delancey's farm, remembered in Delancey Street and Orchard Street. On February 25, 1643, during Kieft's War, colonists massacred forty Wiechquaesgecks at Corlears Hook. In 1833 some of the city's first tenements rose at the Hook, and from the 1840s German settlers, followed by Italians and Eastern European Jews among many others, packed the district's crowded buildings.
Did You Know?
- Corlears Hook is mentioned on the first page of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, published in 1851.
- During the 1832 cholera epidemic a local workshop became a hospital that admitted 281 patients.
- The neighborhood lies in New York's 10th congressional district.
- Its historic definition included today's East Village, Chinatown and Little Italy.
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