Most people who walk through the trendy streets of today’s Lower East Side have no reason to think about farms. But that is what almost all of this land was for most of its modern, post-colonial history: a patchwork of… Read More »The Lower East Side, Before, During, and After the Revolution
Today, ice is produced automatically inside refrigerators. In 1900, it was part of the city’s basic food system. Families placed blocks of ice inside insulated wooden cabinets known as iceboxes. The block slowly melted while keeping milk, meat and other… Read More »The Ice Trust: How a Monopoly Squeezed New York’s Tenement Families
How Pulitzer and Hearst invented outrage journalism in 1890s New York — and built the template cable news and social media still use today.
Wars, famines, generations of political turmoil… Slavic people have endured some of the worst hardships in modern human history. National boundaries have been drawn and redrawn over and over again. By the late 19th century, America gave some reprieve from… Read More »Slavic NYC: The Deep Roots of Eastern Europe in the Five Boroughs
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