Rent in 1900: Cheap on Paper, Hard in Reality At the beginning of the twentieth century, many working-class New Yorkers lived in tenement buildings in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side. These apartments were small and often poorly ventilated. Bathrooms… Read More »Cost of Living in NYC in 1900 vs Today: Rent, Wages, and Real Life
This article is adapted from the upcoming book People vs. Power: The Real Estate Battles That Shaped New York City by LESHP founder, Eric Ferrara. The book examines historic land use and development conflicts across the Five Boroughs, focusing on… Read More »The Fight to Save the Elizabeth Street Garden
This article is adapted from the upcoming book People vs. Power: The Real Estate Battles That Shaped New York City by LESHP founder, Eric Ferrara. The book examines historic land use and development conflicts across the Five Boroughs, focusing on… Read More »The Proposed Brooklyn-Battery Bridge
“A Language Without a Country” Comes to America Yiddish—a fusion of German, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages—was born in medieval Central Europe. For centuries, it thrived in the shtetls (market towns) of Eastern Europe as the everyday tongue of Jews, carrying their… Read More »Hey Putz, This is How Yiddish Became the Secret Language of American Culture
The Colonial Food System Enslavers, primarily the Dutch West India Company (WIC) and private colonists, provided minimal sustenance to enslaved laborers. Archival records from the 1660s outline weekly rations as “half a bushel of maize, four pounds of pork, and… Read More »What Was An Enslaved African’s Diet Like in New Amsterdam?