Lower East Side, Little Italy: I see dead people (New York: tile, living)

[urbanintllctl]

I was recently on a bus en route to a dimsum place in Chinatown, and the bus passed by Hester Street.

Every time I see Hester Street, I feel a wave of fascination and nostalgia.

I'm not that old, you know. I'm not one of those alter kockers who were born here in, say, the 1920s and never left. Hence, a pertinent question: is it possible to feel nostalgia for something one didn't actually experience? I think so, or else, all of literature is of no use.

Hester was one of the iconic streets of the old Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century. Packed with poor immigrants (Jews, Slavs, Italians, whatever), the streets were clogged with pushcarts, the tenements were teeming with residents, and they boiled in summer and froze in winter. Peddlers sold anything and everything, and people worked and strived in stores and sweatshops.

Try to look for the 1970s movie, Hester Street, which stars the very young Carole Kane. She plays a young wife, newly arrived from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, grappling with the shock of living a new life in America, and coping with a thoroughly Americanized husband who has become a stranger to her. At the end of the film, she's divorced and free and looking forward to a new life of her own.

So, whenever I pass by Hester, I see the ghosts of those seamstresses and peddlers and prostitutes and deli owners and bookies and grocers and gangsters.

Only ghosts now, because, of course, the old Lower East Side lives only in archives and in the fading memories of ageing people.

Now, ironically, the young, hip descendants of probably those very same residents flock to the Lower East Side and the stylish enclaves in Ludlow, Stanton, Rivington. Ironically, because their ancestors fled as soon as they made enough money--to the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, to the Upper West Side, to Queens.

Now, other people are moving in. Each day, Little Italy shrinks and Chinatown expands. But, even the Chinese are moving on, and I see more Vietnamese signs each day.

Now,what used to be a synagogue is a Latino evangelical church. In the same way that what used to be a German Protestant church became a synagogue in the 1890s.

I wonder what these newcomers--Latinos, Africans, Chinese, Russians--think of the streets and buildings around them?

During San Gennaro, a nostalgist performer named Baby Bree sang vaudeville songs at the stage in front of the Di Paolo Deli on Grand Street. A group of Chinese matrons and little children sat and respectfully listened. What does this song sung in a vintage Italian accent mean to them, I wondered? I still don't know but one matron seemed very appreciative, clapping and dancing in time to the song.

But more likely, all these allusions and memories are lost to the new residents, as they live in the moment and focus on making their livelihood, in the same way their predecessors did, with little regard for the past and looking only toward the future.

But that's OK. It's great. Each new wave of people adds yet another tile to the gorgeous mosaic that is the city.

More important, they are creating the future memories.

Pete Hamill wrote an elegiac essay "The Lost City of New York," which is a tribute to the usual stuff: the Dodgers, the Automat, the streetcars, and all that. In a foreword to a collection of his essays, he poignantly notes: "Someday, the children of the newest immigrants also might write pieces like these, full of inconsolable memories. I hope I last long enough to read them, just to see what I had missed."

[Kefir King]

HESTER STREET, the film, was a delight but long ago.
I'm going to rewatch it.
Paging Netflix!