scholarly journals Balancing Memory and Material at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-29
Author(s):  
Gabrielle A. Berlinger
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Social History ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
East Side ◽  
The Public ◽  
Intangible Heritage ◽  
Time Capsule ◽  
A Site

Abstract: Founded in a nationally landmarked apartment building on the ever-gentrifying Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum is an historic site of immigrant social history and material culture. Constructed in 1864 and occupied by over 7,000 immigrants until its closing in 1935, this building has withstood constantly rising visitorship each year since its opening as a museum in 1988. With apartment spaces restored for the public to explore without roped-off restriction, this time capsule of domestic immigrant life requires continual maintenance to preserve its historic physical fabric. Through interviews with the Museum staff and the Preservation Advisory Committee (conservators, architectural historians, curators), as well as documentation of technical processes carried out in the preservation process, this ethnographic study investigates the questions and compromises that arise in the preservation of the tangible and intangible heritage contained within an historic structure in constant use. Which narratives are reconstructed through the Museum’s decisions to restore certain material features of the building while allowing others to decay? What are best practices for interpretation and preservation when a museum’s success results in the gradual destruction of its main artifact (the building) through use? This study explores the intersection of museum mission and practice, heritage construction, and historic preservation at a site both sustained and destroyed by its increasing success.

Social Reality of the Drug Problem: New York's Lower East Side

1971 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-391
Author(s):  
Clayton Hartjen ◽  
Richard Quinney
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Drug Addiction ◽  
Social Service ◽  
Community Control ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
East Side ◽  
Drug Problem ◽  
Social Service Agencies ◽  
Reality Construction ◽  
Service Agencies

The scope and nature of social problems are frequently a creation of the various organizations and agencies established to deal with some aspect of community concern. The "educational" and other activities of these groups can be seen as attempts at reality construction. Regarding these efforts, this study examined the kind and effectiveness of drug addiction programs sponsored by social service agencies in New York City's Lower East Side and found them to be wanting. The absence of drug programs and the inability of these agencies to effectively carry out projects of this (and any other) kind appears to be a consequence of the funding structure and the existence of conflict between agencies. It is argued, however, that these agencies can serve as a principal base from which community control over and ultimately any just solution to the drug problem may be initiated.

Lifeblood of the Parish

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Neighborhood Change ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Manual Labor ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Material Religion

Each year the Shrine Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, celebrates its annual Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and San Paolino di Nola. The crowning event is the Dance of the Giglio, a devotional spectacle of strength and struggle in which men lift a four-ton, seventy-foot tower through the streets. This ethnographic study delves into this masculine world of devotion and the religious lives of lay Catholic men. It explores contemporary men’s devotion to the saints and the Catholic parish as an enduring venue for the pursuit of manhood and masculinity amid gentrification and neighborhood change in New York City. It explores the way laymen imagine themselves and their labor as high stakes, the very work of keeping their parish alive. In this Brooklyn church men, money, and devotion are intertwined. In the backstage spaces of the parish men enact their devotion through craft, manual labor, and fundraising. A rich exploration of embodiment and material religion, this book examines how men come to be part of religious community through material culture: costumes, clothing, objects, and tattoos. It argues that devotion is as much about skills, the body, and relationships between men as it is about belief.

Rising from the Gutter

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-92
Author(s):  
Jean Lee Cole
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
East Side ◽  
Jewish American Literature ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
English Speaking

This chapter shows how the early comic strip was developed and then came to influence comic fiction in the early twentieth century. As the editor of the New York Journal‘s comic supplement, Rudolph Block regularized the use of panels, repetitive storylines, and caricature, resulting in the multi-panel format that defines the comic-strip genre. Block’s role in the development of the comic strip has gone largely unrecognized; as a writer of Jewish American literature, Block has been forgotten. Using the pseudonym Bruno Lessing, Block published nearly a hundred stories between 1905 and 1920 in popular magazines. These humorous stories, full of rich dialect and accompanied by vibrant illustrations, translated the multiethnic culture of the Lower East Side for a mainstream, English-speaking audience. Block represented dialect and caricature as opportunities for negotiation and play, providing ways to display identity in multiple and shifting forms.

Law in Politics: Struggles over Property and Public Space on New York City's Lower East Side

1996 ◽  
Vol 21 (02) ◽  
pp. 265-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Brigham ◽  
Diana R. Gordon
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Public Space ◽  
York City ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
East Side ◽  
Social Scientific

This article examines politics on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City, for evidence of law at the constitutive level. We see legal relations shaping grassroots struggles over public space and housing as forums, claims, and political positions. This view challenges instrumental conceptions of law still prominent in some social-scientific approaches.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Goyens
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Historic Preservation ◽  
Lower East Side ◽  
East Side ◽  
Greenwich Village ◽  
German American ◽  
Village Society

On May 30, 2012, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation dedicated a plaque to Justus H. Schwab, who died in 1900, at the site of his Liberty Hall saloon at 50 East 1st Street on the Lower East Side.1 Born in 1847, Schwab was a German American mason by trade and one of the first anarchists in New York. He opened his saloon in 1875 or 1876, and it quickly became a “headquarters for anarchists,” as the ...

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