Memories of Living on the Lower East Side
Yvette Pollack
In January of 1949, my husband Max and I were informed by the New York City Housing
Authority that we had qualified for immediate occupancy of an apartment at 465 East 10th Street,
just off Avenue D. We rejoiced at finally moving into our own home with our three-month-old
baby daughter Debby. Ever since Max’s discharge from the army two years before, we had
occupied the living room of my parent’s Upper West Side apartment (only forty blocks from
where I now live) and it had been a very stressful experience.
After World War II, there was a building boom of low and middle-income housing in New
York Citywhich gave priority to the returning GI’s. The area of Manhattan which probably saw
the most growth of these new apartment buildings was the Lower East Side. Of a dozen or so
complexes, the following four comprised my immediate community.
Stretching from East Houston Street to Fifth Street were the Lillian Wald Houses, a lowincome housing project sponsored by the New York City Housing Authority, and named for a
well-known local social worker and the founder of American Community Nursing. Continuing
north was my NYCHA project, Jacob Riis, named for a prominent photojournalist who had
written definitive books on housing for the poor; this covered Sixth to Twelfth Streets. Directly
following was Stuyvesant Town, a middle-income development sponsored by Metropolitan Life
Insurance. And finally, running to Twenty-Third Street, was PeterCooperVillage, another Met
Life property, but in an even higher high-price category.
Note the difference in the titles of these complexes: whether one was known as a project
or a town or a village was determined partly by its snob value, but mainly by its rent range. The
location of all these buildings was between First Avenue and the East River Drive and although
the “village” and the “town” residents paid two to five times the monthly cost of those who lived
in the projects, we all had the same breathtaking view of the East River.
My move to Avenue D and Tenth Street had not delighted my mother, since she had lived on
Avenue B and Eighth Street thirty years before, upon her arrival in the U.S. from a shtetl in
Poland. She was proud of having, after her marriage in 1912, moved uptown to the more posh
Washington Heights, like so many other European émigrés had done.
However, she really wept when my niece, on the occasion of her new marriage in 1962,
moved to Stuyvesant Townon First Avenue and Fourteenth Street. My mother’s hysteria was
caused by her conviction at that time that her daughter and granddaughter were failures because
they had not made it out of the area of her humble American beginnings over a period of fifty
years. I wonder if she would have had more positive feelings about her daughter’s and
granddaughter’s living quarters if she had lived long enough to know that the apartment for
which my niece had paid $210 in 1968 had had its rent increased in 2003 to $2100!
Our building was only one block west of the waterfront. At night, when I sat silently and
contentedly feeding my baby, I would gaze in wonderment at the boats silently gliding down the
East River, their lights blinking in the darkness. It was fairyland.
At first our rent was fifty six dollars a month, including utilities. When Max had to take a
medical leave from job and school because of a broken ankle, and our income practically
disappeared, our rent was reduced to half of that. Do the math; it really did cost us only twenty
eight dollars for a two-bedroom flat while our neighbors just a few blocks north at Stuyvesant
were paying $120.
Our rooms, of course, were minuscule. Upon entering the apartment for the first time, we
stood in what we assumed was the foyer, and wondered where the living room was: slowly we
perceived that we were actually in it. Another big difference between “the projects” and their
more affluent Lower East Sidedenizens was that we had no doors on any of our closets. While I
was clumsily, but proudly, sewing some cheap monk’s cloth to drape over all of these openings,
in a futile attempt to keep some of the fierce dust off our clothes, my husband was equally
proudly laboring over the construction of our first piece of furniture—a coffee table built of a
huge slab of butcher block with stovepipe legs. The rest of our furniture was what my generation
referred to as “early relatives’or ‘Bronx Renaissance’, similar to what young, struggling couples
today rely upon IKEA to furnish their first apartments.
This area of town was mostly unfamiliar to me, except for the stories about Delancey and
Hester Streets, which were always scorned by the nouveau-riche Jewish uptowners as the poorer
immigrants’ filthy dwelling places.
I excitedly set out to discover its wonders instead of sitting on the benches in front of our
building with the other young mothers, whose life seemed to be totally limited to housework,
childcare, shopping and mah jong. I would spend most of my days pushing a carriage with a
quietly sleeping infant all over this mystical strange new world. I was immediately drawn to the
street-corner barrels of Gus the Pickle Man since my father’s name was also Gus and he, too,
sold pickles, but inside, in his uptown delicatessen store.
I remember how proud Dad had been when I, at the age of eight, wrote my first poem to
be hung above his huge pickle barrel:
A nickel a shtickel is a good old rhyme.
But now the same pickle will cost you a dime.
When I tried to recite this rhyme to the other Gus, he was visibly unimpressed.
My nose eagerly followed other neighborhood smells to the shops that sold Polish kielbasa
and freshly ground Hungarian paprika and other ethnic delicacies I'd never before been exposed
to.But the smell and taste that linger most strongly in my memory are of the goodies in the varied
local bakeries. I have never been able to duplicate the tantalizing aromas of the familiar freshlybaked Jewish crusty rye bread laden with caraway seeds, and the more exotic tastes of the newlyfound Italian canoli and tiramisu.
It was all magic to my twenty-three-year-old self, so eager for all these new adventures. And
shopping at the alluring pushcarts on Avenue C truly made me feel I was in another country, and
at a previous time in history. I must confess, however, that I was motivated to do this roaming
also because of my attitude towards the people I lived amongst. Despite my Marxist theoretical
respect for the proletariat, I also regarded them with an intellectual disdain based on a surety that
this low-income project was not to be our permanent residence.
( I had no way of knowing then that, ten years later when we had made the leap from public
housing to a posh Long Island neighborhood, I would have far less respect for the suburban
snobs there than, when I’d been less mature, for the honest working class families I had once
scorned living amongst.)
I knew that, as soon as Max finished college and became a professional, we would be able to
leave this stop-gap home, unlike the blue and the white-collar neighbors whom I regarded as
lifetime prisoners there. Even after fifty-four years, I can still close my eyes and visualize the
Sunday parade of local residents walking along the riverbank and shopping on the avenues. As
the various groups merged in their meanderings, my husband and I played a guessing game to try
to figure out who lived in each of the red-bricked skyscrapers, all looking alike from the outside.
We finally decided that the richer locals were the ones wearing jeans, then known as
dungarees, since their workweek clothing code was suits and ties in their roles as teachers,
lawyers and similar middle class professions. Contrariwise, the project populaces were decked
out in their weekend finery of suits and ties and high-heeled shoes for the women, since they'd
had to wear more casual outfits or even uniforms, in their jobs, mostly in factories, offices, fire
houses, police stations and post offices. I wonder if such clothing distinctions exist there still, or
anywhere else in New York.
After three years at Jacob Riis, by the way, we did indeed move onward and upward: to a
middle-income housing development in Flushing, Queens; then to an expensive house and
garden in suburban Great Neck. Finally, after the divorce in 1970, I moved back to Manhattan,
into an apartment in a middle-income, state subsidized building on the Upper West Side, back to
my beginnings. And here I have lived so happily and comfortably for the past forty years.
I have never been willing to make a pilgrimage to my old stomping-grounds, knowing that
time has wrought so many changes there and I might not recognize too many of the familiar
landmarks. And I must admit that I would rather treasure the possible unreality of my memories
than risk being confronted with the realities of those changes.
I do, however, have contact with quite a few of its current residents, most of whom
now refer to this area as “Alphabet City”, and have been both amused and bemused to learn that
it has become a choice location for many upwardly mobile young people, with its excellent and
expensive restaurants and its shockingly high rents.
I wonder how many of them are as familiar with, or even as interested, as I am, in their
neighborhood’s ethnic and economic history and development.