The Lower East Side
This is part of a series of walking tours of NYC. Read more.
Rebecca is an old colleague and forever friend from Engineers Without Borders Canada. She is a professional Happy Hour chaser who daylights as Director of Talent at The Rockefeller Foundation. She shares a penchant for history, wandering, and random adventures that may or may not involve shuffleboard, bocce and patios.
Highlights from the tour
- I learned about the significant immigrant history of the Lower East Side, which was the landing pad of so many generations of immigrants. It’s punctuated by the Tennement’s Museum, which documents these generations with a physical space as well as series of walking tours throughout the LES.
- The Old Loew’s Theatre was one of the largest in NYC when it opened in 1926. It’s feature attraction at the time was air conditioning, which attracted huge crowds to the space. A massive, full-storey AC unit still sits on the roof. The theatre now lies abandoned and tucked away behind an appliance store, waiting to be restored to its former glory. The amount of hidden spaces in NYC that lie waiting to be re-imagined and repurposed is breathtaking.
- The LES has a heavy presence of art galleries, young fashionistas, aspiring actors/actresses, and just a general fashion forward crowd that made my Patagonia-clad Boerum Hill neighbourhood in Brooklyn seem suburban in comparison. A near-by audition filled the street with more fashionable and young aspiring talent than I had ever
- The role that parks had to play in building a neighbourhood. A communal meeting point over generations that saw Seward Park be an integral part of each generation’s story that shaped the neighbourhood.
What I’ll come back to see
- The competition between the capitalist and communist governance models, played out in the construction of two neighbouring towers, each now dwarfed in context of the LES and Manhattan in general. A race for supremacy that has long ago ended for these buildings but not for either philosophy as a whole. The communist tower, adorned with faces of Communist heroes like Stalin and Marx, has ironically been converted to luxury condos.
- Cafe Petisco is an amazing restaurant in the shadow of a public library and Seward Park, with a street facing patio that has amazing people watching.
- The Tenement Museum is a heavily recommended stop on the NYC tour. We didn’t go into the museum because it was a nice day, but I’ll return on a blistery day to explore the museum in detail.
- The Lowline, an innovative underground park concept, is located in an old underground trolley yard, utilizing light funnels to channel sunlight into the underground space. The Underline Lab was an initiative open for over a year for the public to submit ideas and suggestions for this new space, but sadly had closed by the time I was able to make it. They’ll be announcing future projects and programming in the coming months.
Food/Drink Highlights?
- Extensive Happy Hours. This is how the frugal LESer plans their afternoon/evenings. Highlights included sushi happy hour, cocktail happy hour, and appetizer happy hour. Somewhere, a community exists of happy hour hoppers that roam the LES from discount to discount. I would like to join that group.
- The aforementioned Cafe Petisco offers a great menu and cocktail list. Best enjoyed on their patio overlooking Seward Park.
- Some other famous food landmarks that we walked past but didn’t participate in include Katz’s Deli, and the Russ & Daughters chain.
