#183 Orchard Street: Life in the Lower East Side

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Places & Travel, History, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.7 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2015

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Lower East Side is one of the most important neighborhoods in America, with a rich history as dense as its former living quarters. Thousands of immigrants experienced American life on these many crowded streets. In this podcast, we look at this extraordinary cultural phenomenon through the lens of one of those -- Orchard Street. Its name traces itself to a literal orchard, owned by a wealthy landowner and Loyalist during the Revolutionary War. By the 1840s the former orchard and farm was divided up into lots, and a brand new form of housing -- the tenement -- served new Irish and German communities who had just arrived in the United States.A few decades later those residents were replaced by Russian and Eastern European newcomers, brought to the neighborhood due to its affordability and its established Jewish character.Living conditions were poor and most tenement apartment doubled as workspaces. Meanwhile, in the streets, tight conditions required a unique retail solution -- the push cart, a form of independent enterprise that has given us some businesses that still thrive on Orchard Street today.You can see this century-old life along Orchard Street today, if you know where to look. Luckily that's what we're here for! With some help from Adam Steinberg at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where the best place to interact with a preserved view of the old days.www.boweryboyshistory.comWe are now a member of Patreon, a patronage platform where you can support your favorite content creators for as little as a $1 a month. Please visit our page on Patreon and watch a short video of us recording the show and talking about our expansion plans. If you’d like to help out, there are five different pledge levels (and with clever names too — Mannahatta, New Amsterdam, Five Points, Gilded Age, Jazz Age and Empire State). Check them out and consider being a patron. We greatly appreciate our listeners and readers and thank you for joining us on this journey so far. And the best is yet to come! Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Bowry Boys Episode 183,
0:02.0	orchard street,
0:03.3	life on the Lower East Side.
0:05.5	Hey, it's the Bowry Boys!
0:07.0	Hey!
0:08.0	Support for the Bowry Boys is provided by our listeners.
0:11.7	Join us for as little as a dollar a month
0:14.2	by visiting patreon.com slash Bowry Boys.
0:20.5	Hi there, welcome to the Bowry Boys. This is Greg Young.
0:23.2	And this is Tom Myers.
0:24.7	And our destination today,
0:26.5	the streets of the Lower East Side in the late 19th century.
0:30.5	And specifically with the focus of one of the most vibrant streets of the day,
0:34.5	orchard street.
0:35.5	We're going back in time for the show,
0:37.5	but also we're going just around the corner.
0:40.5	For as many of our listeners know, we record the show out of our studio,
0:44.5	in the Lower East Side,
0:46.5	just literally steps away from orchard street so close,
0:50.5	in fact, that Greg and I just headed over there before recording to grab a coffee.
0:54.5	Kind of a surreal thing. You can't do that with every subject,
0:57.5	but so you're able to absorb the sights and sounds of orchard street.
	...

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