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New York City's Lower East Side is changing its face and character, but many of the dreams remain the same. Two boxes at end of story.
In 1905, the scribe Hirsch Landy escaped the pogroms of his native Lithuania and made for the shores of the US, the goldene medina. Landing in the Lower East Side of New York, he opened a small Judaica shop on Eldridge Street, in the heart of the neighborhood's bustling Jewish immigrant community.
Eighty years later, J. Levine Books and Judaica was America's largest Jewish bookseller. But in 1986, Landy's great-grandson, Daniel Levine, reluctantly joined the Jewish exodus from the Lower East Side and moved the family business to West 30th Street, in midtown Manhattan.
Levine remembers an incident eight years ago that indicated the direction in which the neighborhood was moving.
"One day, a Chinese man walked in the store and asked for a Chinese-English dictionary," Levine relates. "The manager was surprised, and asked him what he was doing in a Jewish store looking for a Chinese-English dictionary. So the guy said, 'What's a Jewish store doing in the middle of Chinatown?' "
Eldridge Street, a narrow, tenement-lined street, is in the center of the Jewish Lower East Side, not in Chinatown. But if present demographic trends continue, it soon may be.
Once, the Lower East Side was the world's largest Yiddish-speaking community. In 1890, the neighborhood's Jewish population stood at 135,000. By 1910, at the height of the Jewish immigration to the US, more than half a million Jews were squeezed into a tiny area of about five square kilometers between the Bowery and the East River. The colorful, cramped streets boasted hundreds of Jewish restaurants and shops, Yiddish theaters, socialist publications, yarmulka sellers and pickle stands, not to mention the world's most notoriously overcrowded sweatshops and tenement buildings.
But with economic prosperity came mobility. After World War II, the sons and grandsons of the early Jewish immigrants saved their pennies and moved out to greener pastures in the Bronx, Queens, Long Island and New Jersey. By the 1970s, the Jewish-owned retail stores that depended on their patronage began to die.
As Jewish shopowners shut their doors, a new group of entrepreneurs stood waiting to move in:...