I knew I had a great home exchange location when I stopped by to pick up the mail yesterday. I couldn't get into the building because a hip young European tourist was busy arranging her hair, using the window of my new building's front door as her mirror. After about five minutes she continued her window-shopping expedition and I was able to get my mail.
When I was a child, the only reason my mother brought me downtown to the Lower East Side was to buy clothing. The photo above shows pushcart merchants doing business on crowded Lower East Side streets 100 years ago. Replace them with chic boutiques, and change the women in long skirts to European tourists and you can imagine my neighborhood today. Seeing the new but remembering the old is what makes this area so interesting to me.
New York City was, for many years, the world's hub of garment production. People who did not speak any English could come to Manhattan and be working the next day, sewing "piecework". That was before out-sourcing took manufacturing jobs to China, Latin America, and other areas with cheaper labor. The original "sweat shops" were located in industrial lofts on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Before that, clothing was sewn in the tiny Lower East Side tenement apartments of new Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants.
My family is part of that immigrant story, which is part of what is so exciting to me about moving into one of the exact apartment where generations of new Americans landed. What is particularly pleasant is that it has so much old New York character while now being part of a newly-hip neighborhood with fantastic restaurants, shops and nightlife that I can't wait to try.
As someone who knew both the new and old faces of this neighborhood, I find the difference exciting and fascinating. While I worry that home exchangers will focus on the fact that our new place is small and unrenovated, I am trying to find ways to communicate what is so interesting for me about the changes that gentrification has brought to the neighborhood.
I am not an artistic person, but I have been so inspired by my new neighborhood that I have begun a photo project. I am creating images of the remnants of the Old Lower East Side, juxtaposed with stores, merchants or residents who represent the areas new image.
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