On Saturday, April 25th, Bob Swacker (history faculty) led a historical walking tour to capture remaining elements of the Lower East Side as the neighborhood of tenements, quaint specialty shops, manufacturing facilities, synagogues and churches slips away transforming into a modern, hip entertainment district. The tour highlighted reminders of the very early Dutch and English farmsteads, Kleindeutschland, the Jewish-Italian-Slavic L.E.S. of the previous Great Migration, and the more recent Chinese and Hispanic predominance. Niki Russ Federman ’95 gave the group a brief history of the Russ & Daughters Appetizer store. A walk through the 1940 Essex Street Market (a joint product of the policies of Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses) provided a glimpse at a microcosm of ethnic and class shifts in the area. The day capped off with lunch in Chinatown.
