| Lower East Side: Immigrant ghetto, principally Jewish, of New York City in the early decades of the 20th century. Within this overcrowded, squalid area, in tiny railroad flats in dingy tenements on filthy streets were housed about a million Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe(especially Russia and Poland), who had sailed in steerage across the Atlantic to seek freedom from persecution as well as economic opportunity in the Golden Land. With them they brought the Yiddish language and the ghetto culture of the shtetl. However, they were ambitious to enter the mainstream of America through education and hard work. Upward mobility sent these immigrants "uptown" and into the outer boroughs of New York. The Lower East Side is a nostalgic symbol of poverty-stricken immigrants of all nationalities who eventually make it as full-fledged Americans and in the process contributed significantly to the economic, educational and artistic growth of the United States. The term evokes the smells, foods, the pushcarts, the Sabbath preparations, the Yiddish-English argot, the sweatshops, the noisy vendors, the crowds of a bygone era. ~Facts on File dictionary of Cultural and Historical Allusions. |
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